Senior Full-Stack Engineer

About the Role We are hiring a Senior Full-Stack Engineer to become one of the strongest technical contributors on the team. The single most important thing we’re looking for is experience scaling a SaaS product. We want someone who has already seen what happens as a live platform grows: increasing complexity, technical debt, scaling bottlenecks, evolving data models, unreliable integrations, and engineering decisions that worked at one stage but became expensive at the next. This is a hands-on senior engineering role with strong technical leadership expectations. You will design and write production code, own substantial systems end to end, influence architectural decisions, challenge technical direction when needed, and raise the engineering level of the people around you. Project FinTech SaaS platform built for the restaurant and hospitality industry. Our products handle tip pooling and payouts, payroll, reporting and compliance, labor and operational data, and integrations with the systems hospitality businesses already use. The platform is live, serves thousands of customers and moves millions of dollars. Required Hard Skills - Several years operating at Senior Engineer level on a SaaS product that grew significantly while you were there. You have seen a system become meaningfully bigger and understand the problems that tend to arrive next. - Strong Python and Django / Django REST Framework experience, or deep experience in a closely comparable backend stack. We also welcome candidates with strong backend experience in other programming languages and frameworks. - Strong React and TypeScript experience, with the ability to work effectively across backend and frontend when required. - Strong PostgreSQL and data modeling skills. You should be comfortable designing schemas that can evolve as the business grows into new products and safely changing them once they contain production data. - Production experience with asynchronous and distributed workloads using Celery or comparable technologies. - Strong understanding of API design and third-party integrations, including failure handling, retries, idempotency, data consistency, reconciliation, and situations where the system on the other side is unreliable or outside your control. - Strong understanding of software architecture and the ability to make pragmatic architectural decisions inside a large existing codebase rather than only designing systems from scratch. - Experience identifying and addressing performance, scalability, reliability, and maintainability problems before they become critical. - Strong testing practices and experience safely evolving systems that must remain operational while they are being changed. - Production experience with Docker, CI/CD, monitoring, error tracking, and observability. Strong Linux knowledge. - Sound judgment about technical debt: knowing the difference between an acceptable shortcut and one that will create significant problems later, and being able to improve a system while it remains in production. - Everyday experience with using AI agents for work (Claude Code or Codex). Familiar with configuring AI toolset, understanding pros and cons of modern AI. Current Stack Django / DRF, PostgreSQL, Redis, Celery, Docker, Traefik, Datadog, Sentry, Mailgun, GitHub Workflows. Next.js, MUI, TanStack Query, React Hook Form, Zod, Vitest. Nice to Have - FinTech or financial systems experience, particularly payments, payouts, ledgers, reconciliation, payroll, banking, audit trails, or other systems where financial correctness matters. - Experience with restaurant or hospitality technology, including POS, scheduling, workforce management, payroll, or similar systems. - Experience with high-volume or business-critical third-party integrations. - Experience improving a system with meaningful legacy code or technical debt while the product remained actively developed. - Experience with multi-tenant SaaS architectures. - Experience improving engineering practices across a team rather than only within your own work. - Experience as a Senior Engineer in a company of roughly 20–200 people, where your role included helping decide what technical work actually mattered. Required Soft Skills - Ability to take technical ownership beyond your own tickets and think about the health of the product and engineering system as a whole. - Strong engineering judgment and the confidence to challenge technical decisions constructively, including decisions made by Staff Engineers and engineering leadership. - Comfort with ambiguity. Problems will not always arrive fully specified, and part of your job is asking the questions that make them clear before code gets written. - Ability to explain complex technical trade-offs clearly to engineers, Product, and non-technical stakeholders. - A strong teaching mindset. You explain your reasoning, document important decisions, review code seriously, and make the engineers around you better rather than becoming the only person who understands a difficult system. - Comfortable taking leadership during difficult technical situations without waiting for someone else to define every step of the solution. - Strong written communication and self-direction. The team is distributed across Canada and Europe with limited live overlap, so you need to communicate clearly asynchronously and drive your own work. - Fluent English, written and spoken. Who this position is not for This is not a role for someone whose definition of seniority is simply delivering more complicated tickets. If you prefer receiving clearly defined tickets and technical solutions and then implementing them, this role will probably be frustrating. It is not a management role. You won’t have direct reports or headcount responsibility. Leadership here comes through technical ownership, judgment, mentoring, reviews, and influence. It is also not a Staff Engineer role. Our Staff Engineers and VP of Engineering set the overall technical direction and architecture. You will help shape that direction, challenge it when needed, and fully own the design and implementation of substantial systems within it. It is not a greenfield role. You will be joining a live platform with thousands of customers and a roadmap that does not pause while technical improvements are made. Much of the work involves understanding existing systems, migrating them safely, and improving them incrementally rather than replacing them. If you naturally ask what happens when the system gets significantly larger, how it fails, how we know the data is correct, and what today’s shortcut will cost us a year from now, you’ll recognize the work. Things You Should Know Before Applying This position is open to individual candidates only. We do not consider agencies, outsourcing companies, or third-party service providers. The engineering challenge is no longer simply building features quickly. It is continuing to ship while improving reliability, scalability, architecture, and the technical foundation required for significant year-over-year growth. There is technical debt. Part of your job is determining which debt actually matters, making its impact visible, and helping address it without stopping product development. Requirements will sometimes be incomplete. We expect you to help shape the solution rather than wait for perfect specifications. You will be expected to disagree when necessary, propose better approaches, and explain the reasoning behind them.