Software Engineer

Communal; Calgary; Hybrid; CAD 65,000 - 90,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Stock options

Health Spending Account

Hybrid in-office schedule

Mentorship

Product ownership

Job summary

Communal is seeking a developer to join a small Calgary-based team building nonprofit software. You’ll work across Laravel and Vue, shipping features from problem discovery to production and supporting fixes quickly when issues arise.

Ideal candidates have 1–3 years of web app experience, strong communication, and a willingness to own end-to-end delivery in a fast-paced, hybrid environment. Degree-agnostic paths are acceptable.

Qualifications

• 1–3 years building web applications.
• Quick to pick up new stack and domain.
• Clear written communication and collaborative mindset.
• Adaptable to shifting priorities in a small team.

Responsibilities

• Backend development in PHP/Laravel for payments, memberships, bookings, programs, and reporting.
• Contribute to product design decisions and how features work.
• Handle deploys and CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure.
• Collaborate across the team to ship features end-to-end.

Job description

Communal (https://getcommunal.com) is software for community and member-based organizations: community centres and associations, municipal recreation departments, nonprofits, cultural centres, summer camps. Thousands of members across hundreds of organizations run on it.

We are a small team based in Calgary, AB that works with over 500 organizations around the globe to drive impact back to their communities.

We have strong growth and are continuing to expand further into new markets.

Why this job matters

Most of our customers came to us from a spreadsheet, a booking calendar and a payment tool that didn't talk to each other. Renewals get missed, halls get booked and never invoiced, and somebody ends up typing the same member's details into four places.

That's real money, and a lot of volunteer time. These are organizations with no IT staff and a board that turns over every year, so the software is doing work nobody else is going to do.

Better software for these organizations makes a huge difference for their members and local communities. When renewals go out on their own and the hall gets invoiced without anyone chasing it, more money comes in and less of it gets spent on admin. That's what pays for the programs their members turn up for.

The role

This is a role on a small team, working closely with our technical co-founder. We build with immense speed and are working towards becoming one of the best non-profit software solutions in the world.

You'd work across our Laravel and Vue codebase, building features from the first conversation about the problem through to running in production. The same goes for what happens after. Things break, customers report them, and we fix them quickly rather than filing them away for a future sprint. You'd need to be comfortable dropping into unfamiliar code, finding the cause and shipping the fix the same day.

It suits someone with a year or two of experience who wants more room than they're getting now. What we care about most is that you take the whole thing seriously, not just the part where the code gets written. Delivering it all the way to production and making sure everything runs smoothly for our customers matters just as much as building the feature.

A team this size doesn't have anyone to hand things off to, which is the best part of the job if you're at this stage. You'll get your hands on all of it, and probably learn faster than you would anywhere with a bigger team and narrower lanes:

• Backend. PHP and Laravel services covering payments, memberships, bookings, programs and reporting
• Product design. Deciding how a feature should work, not just building it to spec
• Deploys and infrastructure. Our CI/CD pipeline and the servers everything runs on

It moves fast, and the flip side of touching everything is that you'll get pulled between things. Being able to switch contexts without losing the thread matters a lot here.

We work hybrid out of Calgary. Tuesdays and Thursdays in the office are the minimum ask. We value time spent in person to collaborate and problem solve.

Working with AI

We use coding agents every day, and we see the difference it makes in what we ship and how fast our customers get it. This matters to us.

We want someone who is genuinely excited about that. In practice:

• You already use AI coding tools day to day, whether that's Claude Code, Codex or something else, and have a sense of where they help and where they get in the way
• You keep up with what's changing, by reading and by trying things
• You want to help build the tooling, not only use it

You don't need to have built agent workflows before. What matters is that you're eager to. If you aren't passionate about AI and what we can build with it going forward, this isn't the place for you.

What we're looking for

• Around 1 to 3 years building web applications, in whatever stack you learned on
• You pick things up quickly and enjoy it, because the stack and the domain will both be new in places
• You write clearly and you're easy to work alongside
• You're comfortable when things are unsettled. Priorities move around here more than they would at a bigger company
• You care about the people on the other end of the software
• You operate with a high level of agency

Nice to have, not required: PHP, Laravel, Vue, MySQL. If you've built things in something else and you're willing to learn ours, apply anyway.

However you learned this matters less to us than what you can do. Degree, diploma, bootcamp, self-taught, all fine.

What we offer

• Stock options. You own a piece of what you build
• Health Spending Account
• Hybrid, in-office Tuesdays and Thursdays
• Close mentorship and quick feedback
• Real ownership of a product used by organizations across the globe

Not checking every box? Apply anyway. We're looking for hard-working people who are eager to learn and grow with the company.