Staff Backend Engineer

Quo, Inc.; Ottawa; On-site; CAD 189,000 - 222,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Medical coverage

Lifestyle stipend

Flexible PTO

Job summary

Quo, Inc. is seeking a Staff Backend Engineer to own the technical strategy for designing, building, and operating features across the product.

You will partner with engineering, product, and security to translate ambitious ideas into scalable, reliable systems. You will lead architecture for key services, drive cross-functional delivery from concept to production, and mentor engineers while balancing cutting-edge innovation with operational pragmatism.

Qualifications

• Proven success leading architecture for business-critical services.
• Expertise in event-driven and streaming architectures.
• Track record of driving cost optimization and observability.
• Strong incident response capabilities and reliability focus.
• Excellent written and verbal communicator who aligns stakeholders.
• Collaborative leader who mentors teams and elevates engineering quality.

Responsibilities

• Design and own the long-term architecture for key systems (billing, communication).
• Lead cross-functional delivery from PoC to production rollout with engineering, product, design, and CX.
• Establish and drive cost, performance, reliability, and security improvements.
• Mentor engineers through design reviews and technical coaching.
• Stay current on AI advances and translate insights into roadmaps.

Skills

Event-driven architecture

Streaming architectures

Cost optimization

Observability

Incident response

Leadership & mentorship

Communication

Tools

Kubernetes

AWS

PostgreSQL

MongoDB

Redis

RabbitMQ

Job description

About the role

Quo's teams power key systems that help thousands of businesses communicate better. As a Staff Backend Engineer, you will own the technical strategy for how we design, build, and operate features across the product. You'll partner closely with leaders across engineering, product, and security to translate ambitious product ideas into scalable, dependable systems. Your architectural choices will shape key customer experiences and you'll be trusted to balance cutting-edge innovation with rock-solid reliability.

Some of the things you'll do:

• Design and own the long-term architecture for key systems - such as billing services or communication services.
• Lead cross-functional delivery of features from proof of concept to production rollout, partnering with others in engineering, product, design, and CX.
• Establish and drive continuous cost, performance, reliability, and security improvements for our systems.
• Mentor engineers through design reviews, code reviews, and technical coaching, raising the bar for excellence across teams.
• Stay current on advances in AI and other emerging technologies with best practices, translating insights into actionable roadmap proposals.

Tech Stack & Tools:

• Our backend is built on Node using Typescript.
• Our AI Infrastructure uses temporal.io, vector DBs, libraries like Langchain and top-tier llm models.
• We use Kubernetes on AWS to orchestrate our infrastructure setup and deployment.
• The overall architecture is event-driven microservices with RabbitMQ at the center of it.
• We use a variety of databases for different purposes: Postgres, Mongo, Elastic, and Redis.
• We have the following clients - Web (React), Android and iOS.
• Observability Tools: Datadog
• Other Tools: Figma, Linear, Notion, and Slack

About you

• Proven success leading architecture for business-critical services, balancing innovation with operational pragmatism.
• Expertise in event-driven and streaming architectures; you can reason about concurrency, ordering, and back-pressure under load.
• Track record of driving cost optimization, observability, and incident response.
• Excellent written and verbal communicator who aligns diverse stakeholders and produces clear, thorough design docs.
• Collaborative leader who mentors others, fosters psychological safety, and elevates the entire engineering organization.
• Comfortable with ambiguity, you break down complex problems, make informed trade-offs, and deliver iterative value quickly.
• Empathetic and customer-focused, you balance technical decisions with user experience and business impact.

Compensation

The annual base salary range for this position is as follow, plus equity and benefits:

• SF Bay Area, Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland, Boston, New York, and Washington, DC Metro: $205,000 - $242,000 USD
• All other US Locations: $186,000 - $217,000 USD
• Canada: $189,000 - $222,000 CAD

The range displayed reflects the target for new hire salaries, and within this range, individual pay is determined by your skills and experience, as well as relevant education. Your recruiter can share more and answer questions about the specific salary range during the hiring process.

Salary is just one component of Quo's total compensation package. Your total rewards package will include equity, extensive medical coverage, a monthly lifestyle stipend, and a flexible PTO policy.