Staff Software Engineer

Oteligence; Waterloo; On-site; CAD 100,000 - 130,000; Full time

Job summary

A startup in Observability technology located in Waterloo is seeking a Staff Engineer. Your primary focus will be on defining and building key architecture for an orchestration system, along with ensuring high service reliability. The role requires deep Java and Spring expertise, and experience in distributed systems. This position offers a market competitive compensation package including stock options.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of software engineering experience, with 3+ years at a senior level.
• Deep proficiency in Java and experience in Spring ecosystem.
• Experience with cloud-native platforms and security compliance.

Responsibilities

• Design and maintain backend services for observability.
• Define API contracts within a microservices ecosystem.
• Champion security best practices across services.

Skills

Java

Spring ecosystem

Microservices architecture

Observability stacks

Cloud-native platforms

Containerization

CI/CD pipelines

Agile methodologies

Tools

PostgreSQL

Kubernetes

Docker

RabbitMQ

Job description

Company Description

Oteligence is a startup revolutionizing the Observability market. Our focus is to improve Observability outcomes by focusing on better telemetry definition, capture, and management with OpenTelemetry. We foster a dynamic and collaborative environment where every team member plays a crucial role in our success.

Job Description

We are seeking a highly skilled and passionate Staff Engineer to join our team. In this role, you will be defining and building the core architecture and systems of a highly scalable Observability orchestration system. You will work closely with Customer Engineering to refine and implement Oteligence products to support our customer base.

Responsibilities

• Design, implement, and maintain backend services powering an orchestration engine for observability configuration management.
• Define and enforce API contracts and service boundaries within a microservices ecosystem.
• Ensure high levels of availability, scalability, and fault tolerance across distributed services.
• Own end-to-end service lifecycle, from design and implementation through deployment and operations.
• Integrate with observability platforms (e.g., OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, Jaeger) to enable robust monitoring and tracing.
• Champion security best practices, including authentication, authorization, encryption, and audit logging.
• Act as a technical lead for critical initiatives, shaping long-term architectural roadmaps.
• Provide technical mentorship and elevate engineering standards across the team.
• Collaborate with security and compliance stakeholders to ensure adherence to regulatory frameworks.
• Influence product direction by evaluating trade-offs and suggesting pragmatic solutions aligned with business goals.
• Advocate for engineering excellence: maintain high-quality code, testing rigor, and thoughtful documentation.

Operations & Reliability

• Partner and help define SRE and platform engineering to ensure observability, monitoring, and incident response capabilities are baked into all services.
• Participate in on-call rotations and drive improvements in incident response and postmortem processes.
• Continuously improve service reliability through chaos testing, capacity planning, and resilience patterns.

Essential Skills & Experience Required

Technical Expertise

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with at least 3+ years in a senior / staff-level capacity.
• Deep proficiency in Java with extensive hands-on experience in the Spring ecosystem (Spring Boot, Spring Security, Spring Data, etc.).
• Strong background in designing, implementing, and scaling distributed systems and microservices architectures.
• Polyglot development experience is beneficial: .NET, Node.js, Python, Golang, Rust (while these will not be the primary platform engineering stack, ability to work within these ecosystems will be an asset).
• Solid understanding of observability stacks (OpenTelemetry, tracing, metrics, logging pipelines) and configuration management systems.
• Experience building secure, multi-tenant backend services with high compliance requirements (SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, PCI, or similar).
• Proficiency with relational databases (PostgreSQL or equivalent), caching layers (Redis), and message queues (Kafka, RabbitMQ, or similar).
• Strong grasp of cloud-native platforms (AWS / GCP / Azure, Kubernetes, Docker) and infrastructure-as-code practices.
• Familiarity with JVM performance tuning, scalability, and resilience patterns (circuit breakers, retries, backpressure).
• Experience with CI / CD pipelines, automated testing, and DevSecOps practices.
• Proven ability to lead technical initiatives, set architectural direction, and mentor senior and mid-level engineers.
• Skilled at driving cross-functional collaboration with product managers, SREs, and security / compliance teams.
• Strong communication skills, able to explain complex technical concepts to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Demonstrated ability to make pragmatic trade-offs between speed, reliability, and compliance requirements.

Compensation

• Market competitive including options with standard vesting schedule

Seniority level

• Mid-Senior level

Employment type

• Contract

Job function

• Engineering and Information Technology

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