Staff Software Engineer

S&W Technologies; Canada; Remote; CAD 120,000 - 150,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Profit sharing

Fully remote

Health, dental, vision insurance

Career development

Job summary

S&W Technologies is hiring a Staff Software Engineer to own architecture and drive modernization of enterprise systems into cloud-capable solutions. You will work with autonomy in a lean team, ship production code, and mentor peers while serving as a technical backup to the Head of R&D.

You’ll balance design decisions with pragmatic delivery, using AI-assisted tools to accelerate architecture, coding, and documentation, all while collaborating with product and QA to ensure robust, scalable

Qualifications

• 8+ years of professional software engineering with real ownership of architecture and design decisions.
• Proven track record modernizing legacy systems into cloud-capable architectures.
• Full software development lifecycle experience from requirements to operations.
• Strong relational database fundamentals (PostgreSQL, SQL Server, or Oracle).
• Experience in regulated/enterprise software with emphasis on compliance and data integrity.
• Solid secure coding practices and software design principles.
• Mentoring or leading engineers without people management.
• Excellent written and verbal English communication.

Responsibilities

• Own architecture and design decisions for assigned systems, balancing build vs. buy and on-prem vs. cloud.
• Lead modernization of legacy systems into maintainable, cloud-enabled architectures.
• Review requirements early to flag architectural risks and debt.
• Produce architecture docs with rationale and trade-offs for future reference.
• Design and implement significant system components end-to-end.
• Apply AI-assisted development tools to accelerate design, implementation, and documentation.
• Mentor engineers through code reviews, design discussions, and guidance.
• Act as a technical backup to R&D leadership and expand responsibilities over time.
• Translate customer needs into sound technical designs and communicate risk to stakeholders.

Skills

Ownership of architecture

Cloud modernization

Software lifecycle

Relational databases

Secure coding

Mentoring

English communication

AI tooling experience

Tools

CI/CD pipelines

CI/CD tooling

Job description

Description

About the Role

We're hiring a Staff Software Engineer to own architecture and design decisions for our platform, including the modernization of legacy enterprise systems into modern, cloud-capable solutions. You'll operate with significant autonomy, act as a force multiplier for the rest of the engineering team, work closely with our Head of R&D as a technical backup, and be a candidate for broader technical responsibility across projects as you prove yourself. This is a hands-on, high-ownership role on a lean, three-person engineering team - small enough that your architectural calls ship and show results in weeks, not after months of committee review. You'll be a player-coach: as comfortable writing code as setting direction, designing and deciding as well as implementing, delegating, and growing the engineers around you. In an AI-assisted development era, we value sound judgment and design thinking as much as implementation speed - you'll have real latitude to use tools like Claude and Cursor to move faster, not just permission to.

Responsibilities

Architecture & Technical Ownership

• Own architecture and design decisions for the systems you're responsible for, favoring pragmatic, right-sized solutions over unnecessary complexity, and weighing trade-offs (build vs. buy, hosted vs. on-premises, integration approach) with senior-level judgment.
• Lead the modernization of legacy systems into maintainable, cloud-capable architectures without disrupting the business relying on them.
• Review requirements and designs early to flag architectural risk, technical debt, and feasibility gaps before they become expensive.
• Own solution-level architecture documentation - decisions, trade-offs, and the reasoning behind them - so the system stays understandable at a glance, not just in your head.

Hands-On Delivery

• Design and implement significant parts of the system yourself - this role ships production code, not just plans.
• Own what you build end-to-end, including its health after it ships - if it breaks in production, you're part of fixing it.
• Apply AI-assisted development tools (e.g., Claude, Cursor) to work faster across design, implementation, and documentation, with informed judgment about where they genuinely help.

Team Leadership & Mentorship

• Delegate work effectively and help pull the wider team forward, rather than carrying everything yourself.
• Mentor other engineers through code review, design discussion, and day-to-day guidance, as an individual contributor rather than a people manager.
• Act as a technical backup to the Head of R&D, and take on broader technical responsibility across projects over time.

Product & Customer Judgment

• Translate ambiguous customer needs - including regulated-industry and enterprise requirements - into sound technical designs.
• Work closely with product owners, QA, and subject-matter experts to understand how the product is used and where the real risk lies.
• Communicate trade-offs, risks, and plans clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Ways of Working

• Operate independently in ambiguous, shifting-priority conditions, setting your own priorities rather than waiting to be told what's next.
• This role has no fixed lane - architecture, hands-on coding, mentoring, production support, whatever's needed. You pick it up rather than waiting for it to be assigned.
• Participate in and help shape Agile ceremonies (stand-ups, sprint planning, retrospectives).

Our Stack

• Frontend: React (TypeScript) single-page applications.
• Backend: polyglot services, primarily .NET and Python, built as event-driven microservices.
• Databases: PostgreSQL, SQL Server, and Oracle.
• Infrastructure: containerized, Kubernetes-based deployments with owned CI/CD pipelines.
• Deployment model: hybrid - both cloud-hosted (SaaS) and on-premises enterprise environments.
• API & identity: API gateway / service mesh patterns and OIDC-based identity providers.
• We're also maintaining and modernizing some longer-standing legacy systems - comfort reading and evolving older architectures is part of the job.

Requirements

What You'll Bring

Must-Have

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, including real ownership of architecture and design decisions - not just executing someone else's plan.
• Proven track record modernizing legacy systems into maintainable, cloud-capable architectures.
• Full software development lifecycle experience: requirements through design, implementation, testing, release, and operations.
• Strong relational database fundamentals (e.g., PostgreSQL, SQL Server, or Oracle).
• Experience in regulated-industry and/or enterprise software environments, with a real appreciation for compliance, data integrity, and audit requirements.
• Solid grounding in secure coding practices and software design principles.
• A track record of mentoring or informally leading other engineers - pulling a team forward, not just excelling individually.
• Excellent written and verbal communication in English, with both technical and non-technical audiences.

Nice-to-Have

• Hands-on experience designing and owning CI/CD pipelines, not just using ones someone else built.
• Experience with hybrid deployment models - supporting both cloud-hosted/SaaS and on-premises enterprise environments.
• Experience across more than one of PostgreSQL, SQL Server, and Oracle.
• Practical, regular use of AI-assisted development tools (Claude, Cursor, or similar) in your day-to-day engineering workflow.
• A habit of evaluating and adopting new tools and technologies early.
• Experience designing or shipping AI/ML-powered features in a production application (e.g., using LLMs, cloud AI/ML services, or applied ML) - we're actively exploring how AI capabilities fit into our platform.

You'll Thrive Here If

• You're comfortable operating with autonomy and ambiguity, reasoning from first principles when there's no existing playbook to follow.
• You're self-directed with a "get it done" mindset - you pick up what's needed rather than waiting for it to be assigned.
• You want your architecture decisions to matter beyond a single sprint, on a team small enough to notice.

Benefits

• Competitive salary aligned to experience and market.
• Employee profit sharing plan.
• Fully remote.
• Comprehensive health, dental and vision insurance.
• High ownership and autonomy across product marketing initiatives.
• Opportunity to work directly with leadership in a fast-paced environment.
• Fast-growing environment with strong long-term career development potential.