- Own technical direction and architecture evolution of a live, revenue-generating platform
- Scale throughput and reliability while customers onboard, including zero-downtime changes to running systems
- Harden the platform: tenant isolation, rate limiting, security, data integrity
- Establish observability, SLOs, and incident practices as the customer base grows
- Lead performance and capacity work ahead of demand, not behind it
- Raise engineering standards through design reviews and mentorship
- Partner with Product to balance platform investment against feature delivery
- Identify and retire scaling risks and technical debt before they compound

Requirements

- 10+ years building and operating cloud-native backend or platform systems
- Owned the scaling of a production SaaS or data platform through rapid customer growth: hardening, re-architecture under load, and maturing an early product to enterprise grade
- Deep hands-on experience with high-throughput distributed systems: event streaming or message queues, async processing, idempotency, retries, backpressure
- Solid performance engineering: profiling, load testing, horizontal scaling, capacity planning
- Production reliability ownership: observability, SLOs, incident management, fault-tolerant design
- Multi-tenant SaaS experience, including tenant isolation and noisy-neighbor problems
- Proficiency in Python and JavaScript/TypeScript (Next.js)
- Hands-on daily coder with founder-level ownership; comfortable in low-process, high-ambiguity environments
- Built or scaled an integration platform,



ETL/data pipeline product, or API platform (connectors, transformation pipelines, webhooks) (Nice to Have)
- Kafka or similar streaming infrastructure at scale (Nice to Have)
- Supply chain or logistics systems exposure (WMS, OMS, TMS, EDI integrations) (Nice to Have)
- AI-assisted engineering workflows; AI is deeply embedded in how we build (Nice to Have)
- Experience shipping AI/LLM-driven capabilities in production (rag, generation pipeline, agentic workflows) (Nice to Have)

Core Competencies

Demonstrates expertise in scaling cloud-native backend systems, ensuring production reliability, and implementing performance engineering practices. Proficient in Python and JavaScript/TypeScript, with a strong focus on multi-tenant SaaS architecture and observability.

Highest-signal resume keywords

- Cloud-Native Backend Systems
- Performance Engineering
- Production Reliability Ownership
- Multi-Tenant SaaS Experience
- High-Throughput Distributed Systems

ATS Optimization Keywords

Hard Skills

- Python
- JavaScript
- TypeScript
- Event Streaming
- Message Queues
- Async Processing
- Load Testing
- Capacity Planning
- Fault-Tolerant Design
- Tenant Isolation

Soft Skills

- Mentorship
- Leadership
- Collaboration

Industry Keywords

- SaaS
- Data Platform
- Observability
- Incident Management
- Scaling Risks
- Technical Debt

Tools & Technologies

- Kafka
- ETL
- API Platforms
- Integration Platforms
- AI/LLM-Driven Capabilities

#J-18808-Ljbffr

📌 Principal Engineer (Toronto)
🏢 Jobtailor
📍 Toronto