Full Stack Engineer (Backend Focus)

Commons; Canada; Remote; CAD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Commons is seeking a mid to senior IC backend engineer to lead the backend and platform side, including data models, integrations, infrastructure, and security.

You will work across the stack with frontend and product teammates, own end-to-end features, and guide decisions on architecture, CI/CD, and outages. This role emphasizes privacy, security, and AI tooling to boost developer speed.

Qualifications

• 5+ years building production software across the stack, backend-focused.
• Design core data models and migrations for scalable apps.
• Own third‑party integrations and build vs. buy decisions.
• Run CI/CD pipelines and monitor systems.
• Lead outages and escalation management, including infra.
• Keep dependencies up to date and simplify stack.
• Collaborate with data team to improve privacy and security.
• Leverage AI coding tools to speed up workflows.
• Explain technical tradeoffs to non-technical stakeholders.
• Love tackling new and different problems.
• Prefer an IC role, not management.

Responsibilities

• Building features end to end, from database to UI, and reviewing PRs.
• Designing and evolving core data models, and review migrations.
• Owning third‑party integrations and build vs. buy decisions.
• Running CI/CD (GitHub Actions and CircleCI), monitoring (New Relic, Sentry), and infrastructure on Render, Postgres, and Redis.
• Lead outages and escalations, especially infrastructure-related.
• Keeping dependencies up to date, and simplifying the stack.
• Working with data team to improve privacy and security.
• Helping build AI coding tools and workflows team‑wide.

Skills

Backend development

PostgreSQL

CI/CD

Security & Privacy

Cloud/Infra

Tools

GitHub Actions

CircleCI

New Relic

Sentry

Render

Job description

Commons is a platform that helps people use their money to build the life and world they want.

Through our personal finance app, hundreds of thousands of individuals track, manage, and offset the impact of their dollars, saving $2,000 on average and lowering emissions by 10% a year.

Through our carbon advisory offering, we provide end-to-end carbon diligence and portfolio management services for the world's most impactful individuals and teams. Commons is one of the top 50 buyers of high-integrity carbon credits in the world, offering individuals access to the highest-quality projects typically reserved for top buyers.

Commons has scaled meaningfully with a scrappy, tenacious, passionate team of 10-15 people. We aren’t afraid to move fast and try new things to meet our customers where they are. We’re looking for one unique engineer to join our ranks.

The role

Everyone on our small team builds across the whole stack, and you will too. You’ll also play the specific role of leading the backend and platform side of Commons (data models, integrations, infrastructure, and security), complementing your teammates’ frontend and product expertise.

This is a mid to senior IC role, with room to grow in influence and scope. You’ll solve new problems every day across multiple surfaces, switching from polishing frontend features to architecting databases; alternating between mobile and web development; and going between building frontend tests for your own code to helping a teammate automate their workflow.

You’ll be responsible for:

• Building features end to end, from database to UI, and reviewing PRs
• Designing and evolving our core data models, and review migrations before they go out
• Owning our third‑party integrations and making build vs. buy calls
• Running CI/CD (GitHub Actions and CircleCI), monitoring (New Relic, Sentry), and infrastructure on Render, Postgres, and Redis
• Lead in any outages and escalations, especially anything infrastructure-related
• Keeping dependencies up to date, and simplifying the stack where you can
• Working with our data team to improve privacy and security practices
• Helping build out AI coding tools and workflows team‑wide to increase speed and efficacy

The team

You'll join a distributed engineering team of three other engineers, one in the US and two in Manila, all working across the stack. You’d lead backend architecture and own backend and platform decisions.

You’ll partner closely with product, design, marketing, and data teammates to make decisions and coordinate on new features and capabilities. Our team is highly collaborative, in touch daily over slack and video. We’re looking for a team member who likes collaborating, explains their thinking in code reviews and design discussions, and wants to build their own skills and help others to do the same.

What we're looking for

• 5+ years building production software across the stack, with most of your depth on the backend. We'll consider fewer years with the right experience.
• You think in capabilities, not features. You look to build foundations to iterate on, rather than fully‑polished final products.
• You're used to building and shipping features yourself from end to end.
• You’ve built backend systems from the ground up and owned production at a startup. You've set up CI, added monitoring, and been the one who got paged. You’re comfortable being the first port of call in an outage or emergency.
• You know Postgres well, have designed schemas from scratch, and have run migrations on systems people were actively using.
• You've built and maintained third‑party integrations and made build vs. buy decisions you can defend.
• You take data security and privacy seriously.
• You are deeply embedded in AI and agentic coding tools. You use them to build, refine, and check your work. You’re passionate about helping others improve their workflows.
• You can clearly explain technical tradeoffs to people without a technical background.
• You love tackling new and different problems.
• You aren’t looking to be a manager – or to be managed. You enjoy teams where everyone is building, owning, and co‑creating.