Staff Software Engineer

Affinity; Canada; Hybrid; CAD 140,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Affinity is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to push our product in new directions across the backend, data model, and frontend visualizations. This hands-on role spans the stack and collaborates with product and design to shape what gets built.

You will own architectural decisions, mentor engineers, improve reliability and performance, and help the team move fast while delivering high-quality products for our customers.

Qualifications

• 10+ years building and shipping production software as a full-stack engineer or equivalent.
• Experience leading ambiguous, high-stakes projects and driving architectural decisions.
• Strong server-side experience with modern OOP; prefer Ruby and PostgreSQL.
• Experience building component-based interfaces with React and TypeScript.

Responsibilities

• Set and own the technical direction for a core product domain, including architecture and tradeoffs.
• Lead complex, multi-quarter initiatives end to end, breaking down problems for other engineers.
• Partner with product and design from problem-def definition to solution delivery.
• Mentor senior and mid-level engineers and raise the technical bar through reviews and code reviews.
• Identify high-leverage investments in reliability, performance, and developer velocity.

Skills

Full-stack engineering leadership

Ruby

PostgreSQL

React

TypeScript

AWS

Kubernetes

AI tooling familiarity

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or equivalent

Tools

Docker

CI/CD

Job description

With a growing customer base and expansion into new markets and use cases, we have more to build than ever at Affinity as we execute on our vision to put relationship intelligence at every professional's fingertips.

Reporting to the Sr Engineering Manager, as a Staff Software Engineer, you'll have the opportunity to push our product in new directions while also shaping the next iterations of the features our customers already love. This is a hands-on role with broad scope. You'll work across the stack, from our data model and async processing on the backend to design systems and rich visualizations on the frontend. You'll also be one of the people product and engineering leadership come to when the path forward isn't obvious yet.

What you'll do

• Set and own the technical direction for a core product domain, including the architecture decisions, the sequencing, and the tradeoffs you choose to make and defend

• Lead complex, multi-quarter initiatives end to end, breaking ambiguous problems into work other engineers can pick up and run with

• Partner closely with product and design from the problem-definition stage, shaping what gets built and not just how it gets built

• Raise the technical bar across the team through design review, code review, and mentorship of senior and mid-level engineers

• Identify the highest-leverage investments in reliability, performance, and developer velocity in your area, and make the case for them

• Own the operational health of what you build, including performance, observability, and on-call for your domain

• Work fluently with AI development tools and help the team get better at using them well, including where they genuinely speed us up and where they don't

What we're looking for

• 10+ years building and shipping production software as a full-stack engineer, with a track record of technical leadership on ambiguous, high-stakes projects

• Demonstrated impact beyond your own team, whether that's through architecture other teams build on, standards you established, or engineers you grew

• Strong server-side experience with modern OOP practices; we use Ruby and PostgreSQL, and we're open to candidates with deep expertise in a comparable stack who are motivated to pick ours up

• Experience building component-based interfaces with React and TypeScript

• Deep understanding of relational databases, including designing systems that scale and diagnosing performance bottlenecks before they reach customers

• Practical fluency with AI-assisted development (Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, or similar) and good judgment about when to use it, how to review what it produces, and where the risks are

• Pride in delivering high-quality, powerful products to customers while championing technical excellence

• Eagerness to contribute your ideas and experience to help Affinity keep improving as a product and as a company

Nice to haves

• Experience building product features on top of LLMs or agent frameworks, including how you evaluated and monitored them

• Experience in a company where AI-assisted development was the norm rather than an experiment

Our tech stack

React and TypeScript on the front end, Ruby and PostgreSQL on the back end. Our infrastructure is hosted on AWS and runs on Kubernetes.

How we work

Our culture is a key part of how we operate, and of how we hire:

• We iterate quickly. You should be comfortable with ambiguity, able to cut through it, and able to deliver incremental value to customers every sprint.

• We're candid and transparent. We speak our minds while caring personally about every person we interact with.

• We make data-driven decisions. We make the best decision available at the moment, with the information we have.

If you'd like to learn more about our values, click here.

About Affinity

Affinity is the AI-first CRM for private capital, helping firms turn relationship intelligence into action across the investment lifecycle. Built on a decade of proprietary relationship, interaction and deal data, Affinity automatically captures activity, maps firm networks, and surfaces the connections and insights that help investors source, evaluate and win opportunities.

Trusted by more than 3,300 private capital firms, including 40% of the venture capital market and more than 330 private equity buyout teams, Affinity powers one of the industry's deepest relationship graphs. The platform is built on more than 130 billion structured relationships, 177 million people tracked, 88 million companies tracked and 31 billion interactions, helping firms uncover opportunities sooner, move with greater conviction and scale institutional knowledge over time.

Learn more: affinity.co