Staff Software Architect

Job Description

• This position is posted by Jobgether on behalf of a partner company. We are currently looking for a Staff Software Architect in Canada. This is a highly hands-on architectural leadership role where deep engineering craft and system ownership come together. You will design and build scalable backend systems powering live, high-traffic gaming platforms while also defining the technical direction of the studio. Unlike traditional architecture roles, this position requires extensive time in the codebase, where you will actively develop production systems, optimize performance, and directly implement critical architectural decisions. You will also guide engineering standards, improve system reliability, and help integrate modern AI capabilities into gameplay and internal tools. Working in a small, high-performance studio environment, you will collaborate closely with engineers, product leaders, and stakeholders to ensure technical decisions translate into real player impact. This role is ideal for a senior technologist who thrives on building, not just designing, and who enjoys raising the technical bar across an entire engineering organization.
• Accountabilities: Design, build, and maintain scalable backend systems, APIs, and services supporting live gaming platforms at scale. Personally implement key architectural components including data models, service boundaries, caching strategies, and asynchronous processing systems. Drive system performance optimization through profiling, query tuning, and latency reduction using data-driven approaches. Lead integration of AI and LLM technologies into game systems and internal tooling, enabling dynamic content and intelligent automation. Establish and improve observability systems including logging, metrics, tracing, and monitoring for production reliability. Define and enforce engineering standards across CI/CD, security, testing, and infrastructure practices. Lead incident response and postmortem processes, ensuring long-term system resilience and reliability improvements. Collaborate with cross-functional leaders in product, finance, and legal to align technical strategy with business objectives. Own FinOps practices, monitoring infrastructure costs and optimizing cloud resource usage. Drive AI adoption strategy across the engineering organization, evaluating build vs buy decisions for AI systems and tools. Requirements: 10+ years of software engineering experience, including at least 3 years as a senior/staff/principal-level individual contributor remaining hands-on. Proven recent experience designing and building production systems within the last 2 years. Strong background in high-availability, high-throughput consumer-facing or gaming systems. Deep experience with AWS services including IAM, VPC, ECS/Fargate, S3, KMS, and security tooling. Strong Infrastructure-as-Code experience (Terraform or CDK) and CI/CD pipelines (e.g., GitHub Actions). Experience owning system security, privacy, and compliance in production environments. Strong knowledge of distributed systems principles including SLOs, incident response, and system reliability engineering. Experience with relational and non-relational data architecture at scale. Familiarity with observability tools such as OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Datadog, or similar. Experience integrating AI/ML solutions into production systems (e.g., OpenAI APIs, LangChain, vector databases). Excellent communication skills with the ability to influence across technical and non-technical stakeholders. Nice to have: experience with gaming platforms, live-service products, Unity, or web-based game technologies. Benefits: Competitive salary ranging from $140,000 to $200,000 CAD depending on experience. Uncapped profit-sharing program. Comprehensive health, dental, and vision coverage. 3 weeks of vacation starting, plus paid holiday shutdown in December. 12 paid care days per year. Annual continuous improvement allowance for professional development. Remote-first work environment with flexible engagement. Opportunity to work on games enjoyed by millions of players globally. Direct access to leadership with minimal bureaucracy and high autonomy. Strong, collaborative culture focused on ownership, craftsmanship, and impact.
• How Jobgether works: We use an AI-powered matching process to ensure your application is reviewed quickly, objectively, and fairly against the role's core requirements. Our system identifies the top-fitting candidates, and this shortlist is then shared directly with the hiring company. The final decision and next steps (interviews, assessments) are managed by their internal team. We appreciate your interest and wish you the best! Why Apply Through Jobgether? Data Privacy Notice: By submitting your application, you acknowledge that Jobgether will process your personal data to evaluate your candidacy and share relevant information with the hiring employer. This processing is based on legitimate interest and pre-contractual measures under applicable data protection laws (including GDPR). You may exercise your rights (access, rectification, erasure, objection) at any time. #LI-CL1
• We may use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support parts of the hiring process, such as reviewing applications, analyzing resumes, or assessing responses. These tools assist our recruitment team but do not replace human judgment. Final hiring decisions are ultimately made by humans. If you would like more information about how your data is processed, please contact us.
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