Staff Engineer

Staff Engineer (Backend)

About Boast

Boast is redefining how companies unlock R&D funding, turning a complex, manual, and audit-prone process into a streamlined, scalable engine for growth. By combining deep technical and R&D tax expertise with purpose-built AI, Boast helps companies across Canada and the U.S. unlock critical funding with confidence so they can focus on building and growing. Since 2011, Boast has helped thousands of businesses access over $600 million in innovation capital.

At Boast, engineers have meaningful ownership over how the product evolves. You’ll have room to shape technical direction, modernize how things are built, explore new AI-enabled capabilities, and contribute across the stack where it matters. It’s a fantastic opportunity for someone who wants to stay hands-on while having a real voice in what gets built next.

About the Role

As a Staff Engineer (Backend), you’ll be one of the most senior technical voices on Boast’s engineering team, helping shape the next phase of a product that is becoming more intelligent, more automated, and increasingly self-service.

This is a genuine hands-on Staff role where you'll design systems, write code, make architectural decisions, and help bring work from idea through implementation. Backend will be your strongest area, but you’ll also work across infrastructure, data, AI-enabled functionality, and the front end when the work calls for it.

There’s meaningful work on both sides of the platform today: building new capabilities while simplifying and modernizing existing systems. You’ll have the opportunity to influence how that balance evolves, help set strong engineering practices, and make thoughtful decisions about where the team invests its time.

We’re looking for someone with deep technical foundations, strong judgment, and genuine curiosity. You’re thoughtful in how you approach new problems, comfortable navigating ambiguity, and able to make sound decisions without overcomplicating the solution.

📍 Location: Remote within Canada

💻 Technical environment: TypeScript/Node.js, Python/Django, React, MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis, GCP, Kubernetes, Cloud Run, Pub/Sub, Datadog, LaunchDarkly and LLM APIs.

Key Responsibilities

• Own and evolve backend architecture across services, APIs, data models, integrations, and asynchronous or event-driven systems
• Lead technical design for high-impact projects and stay hands-on from architecture through implementation and rollout
• Build new product capabilities, including AI-enabled features, while helping modernize and consolidate existing systems
• Set a strong standard for reliable engineering, including observability, error handling, retries, safe migrations, resilient integrations, and thoughtful incident response

• Use AI-assisted development tools as part of your day-to-day work and help the team develop effective, responsible practices for using them
• Make pragmatic technical decisions, balancing quality, speed, technical debt, customer impact, and the cost of complexity
• Raise the technical bar through design and code reviews, shared engineering practices, clear documentation, and mentorship of other experienced engineers
• Partner closely with Product and Design to shape solutions, evaluate trade-offs, and find practical paths from idea to delivery
• Contribute across the stack when needed, including infrastructure and front-end work, and help strengthen security, privacy, tenant isolation, and SOC 2 practices

What You Bring

• 8+ years of software engineering experience, including 3+ years operating at a Senior, Staff, Principal, or comparable level
• Deep experience designing, building, and operating backend and distributed systems in production
• Strong technical foundations across APIs, data modeling, networking, concurrency, transactions, caching, queues or event-driven architectures, and system performance
• Production experience with TypeScript/Node.js or Python, with the technical breadth to work effectively across both
• Experience owning architecture and technical direction beyond your individual features or codebase
• Strong cloud-native engineering experience, including containerized environments, CI/CD, infrastructure, and production operations
• Experience with relational databases such as MySQL or PostgreSQL, along with experience working with additional data stores such as MongoDB
• A hands-on engineering approach and comfort working beyond the backend when the work calls for it
• Experience using modern AI coding or agent tools as part of your development workflow, with strong judgment around how their output is reviewed and used
• Strong technical judgment, communication, and the ability to make thoughtful decisions in complex or evolving environments

Even Better If You Have

• Experience shipping AI or LLM-powered product features into production, including considerations such as evaluation, structured outputs, reliability, latency, fallbacks, or cost
• Experience with GCP and Kubernetes, including technologies such as GKE, Cloud Run, Pub/Sub, or Cloud SQL
• Experience building third-party integrations using APIs, OAuth, webhooks, or external data sources

• Experience with multi-tenant SaaS architecture, SOC 2, security, privacy, or other regulated environments
• Experience in fintech, tax, accounting, financial software, or another regulated industry
• Experience helping an engineering team establish effective AI-assisted development practices
• Open-source contributions, published technical writing, or conference speaking

Boast Benefits

• Comprehensive health and dental benefits package
• RRSP matching program
• Three weeks of paid vacation per year
• Remote-first environment with access to co-working spaces in Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver, and Calgary
• Opportunity to take ownership of meaningful work and directly influence the architecture and future direction of a growing product

Boast is an equal opportunity employer committed to diversity and inclusion. We prohibit discrimination and harassment of any kind based on race, colour, sex, religion, sexual orientation, national origin, disability, genetic information, pregnancy, or any other protected characteristic as outlined by provincial, federal, state, or local laws.

This policy applies to all employment practices within our organization, including hiring, recruiting, promotion, termination, layoff, recall, leave of absence, compensation, benefits, training, and apprenticeship. Boast makes hiring decisions based solely on qualifications, merit, and business needs at the time.

We appreciate the interest of all applicants, but only qualified candidates will be contacted for further consideration