## Staff Software Engineer
- II (KeyCite)Apply: Hybrid: Canada, Toronto, Ontario: Full time: Posted Today: End Date: January 4, 2027 (30+ days left to apply): JREQ204795

Job Description
As a Staff Software Engineer II at KeyCite, you will lead complex, business-critical engineering initiatives from architecture through production. You will modernise established platforms while maintaining the reliability that customers depend on, and you will set technical direction across teams.

Key Responsibilities
* Lead complex engineering initiatives, designing and delivering end-to-end solutions for large-scale, business-critical systems.
* Modernize core KeyCite platforms and services using modern architectural patterns without disrupting critical customer-facing products.
* Design distributed services, processing systems and APIs that meet demanding standards for performance, availability, scalability and maintainability.
* Lead architecture and design decisions across complex systems, balancing near-term delivery with long-term sustainability.
* Build scalable data-processing capabilities for large volumes of structured and unstructured legal content and metadata.
* Identify architectural constraints and systematically simplify, modernize or replace components, while enabling teams to keep delivering business value.
* Assess emerging technologies and architectural approaches based on measurable improvements to scalability, reliability, developer productivity and customer outcomes.
* Champion modern practices across design, development, testing, observability, security, deployment and operational ownership.
* Establish measurable standards for quality, reliability, security and maintainability.
* Work across engineering teams and with Product and Architecture to solve problems that span organizational and system boundaries.




* Partner with engineering and product leadership on long-term technical strategy.
* Establish patterns and standards that are adopted beyond your immediate team.
* Act as the technical authority for complex architecture and engineering decisions.
* Mentor engineers and develop senior engineering talent.
* Lead technical discussions and design reviews, and raise the engineering bar across the organization.
* Communicate complex technical concepts clearly to senior technical and non-technical stakeholders.
* Translate business and product requirements into durable technical architectures.
* Make pragmatic trade-offs between feature delivery, modernization and technical debt.
* Identify opportunities to reuse platform capabilities rather than building bespoke solutions.
* Connect technical investment to measurable product and business outcomes.
* Recognize the importance of reliability and accuracy in systems that support professional research. Required Qualifications* 6+ years of experience in designing and delivering complex production software systems.
* Deep expertise in backend and distributed systems engineering.
* Strong experience with cloud-native architectures, preferably on AWS.
* Experience designing APIs, services and event-driven architectures.
* Experience with large-scale data processing and data pipelines.
* Strong understanding of system reliability, scalability, performance and observability.




* Experience modernizing complex legacy or long-lived production systems without disrupting existing customers.
* Strong programming skills, ideally in Java and/or Python.
* Experience with modern engineering practices, including automated testing, CI/CD, infrastructure automation and production monitoring.
* Demonstrated ability to influence architecture and technical direction beyond an individual team.
* Ability to independently navigate ambiguous, highly complex technical problems.
* Solid communication skills, with the ability to explain architectural trade-offs to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
* Experience mentoring senior engineers and raising technical standards across teams. Preferred Qualifications* Experience with high-volume content, publishing, search or information-processing platforms.
* Experience with search and information retrieval technologies.
* Experience with large-scale metadata or knowledge systems.
* Experience with graph or relationship-oriented data models.
* Experience building platforms or services consumed by multiple products and engineering teams.
* Experience operating highly available, business-critical systems.
* Exposure to legal technology, professional information or other domains where accuracy, provenance and reliability are critical.
* Familiarity with AI-enabled applications and the backend and data infrastructure that supports them.#LI-GK1 New Position: This position is open due to an existing vacancy to support our evolving business needs. What’s in it For You?* Hybrid Work Model: We’ve adopted a flexible hybrid working environment for our office-based roles while delivering a seamless experience that is digitally and physically connec

📌 Staff Software Engineer (Toronto)
🏢 Reuters
📍 Toronto