Reports to: Director of Engineering

Location: Toronto, Canada or United States (Remote)

About the Role

Backcountry is looking for a senior engineer to own the architecture, development, and reliability of the web applications powering our ecommerce business - the customer-facing storefront, the back-office operations platform, and the supporting services that connect them. As Senior Software Engineer, Ecommerce Web Applications, you will work primarily in PHP applications (a Symfony-based storefront and a Laravel back-office platform), shape the front-end experience with JavaScript and CSS, and drive technical direction that the rest of the team builds on.

Within your first 6-12 months you will have delivered measurable improvements to system reliability and performance, reduced technical debt in legacy components, established patterns that lift the whole team's delivery velocity, and become a trusted technical leader others turn to. AI coding tools are core to how this team works - you will use AI-assisted development daily, raise the bar for how the team leverages it, and help define the workflows, patterns, and guardrails that make AI-augmented engineering effective and safe.

This is a lean team. You will own a lot, move fast, and make decisions with full end-to-end responsibility.

What You'll Do

• Drive architecture, hands-on development, testing, deployment, documentation, and production support across PHP web applications (a Symfony-based customer storefront and a Laravel back-office platform).
• Lead front-end direction with JavaScript (including jQuery) and CSS to deliver responsive, accessible, high-performing customer experiences.
• Champion and evolve the team's AI-assisted development workflows: use AI tools daily, share techniques, and raise the bar for how effectively and responsibly the team uses them.
• Own the data layer: design and optimize queries and schema interactions against relational databases (SQL Server and PostgreSQL) and supporting services.
• Set and uphold engineering standards through code review, mentorship, testing practices, and clear technical documentation (design docs, runbooks, onboarding material).
• Improve reliability, observability, alerting, and incident response for mission-critical, customer-facing systems.
• Identify opportunities to simplify legacy components, reduce technical debt, and deliver long-term efficiency gains.
• Break large initiatives into deliverable chunks and clearly communicate status, roadblocks, and dependencies to engineering and product leadership.
• Partner with Product, QA, and Engineering leadership to ship scalable, user-focused features that elevate business value.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent professional experience.
• 5+ years of professional software development experience with a strong ecommerce or high-traffic web application background.
• Deep, hands-on expertise with PHP, including production experience with Symfony and/or Laravel.
• Strong front-end skills with JavaScript and CSS, and a solid grasp of web fundamentals (HTTP, browser behavior, performance, accessibility).
• Strong understanding of relational databases and SQL, including query optimization and schema design.
• Proven experience designing, building, and maintaining production systems with real end-to-end ownership.
• Hands-on experience leveraging AI coding tools for development, and the ability to mentor others on using them effectively. This is an AI-development-driven team.
• Experience with testing practices (unit/integration), Git workflows, and CI/CD.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills, and a track record of mentoring engineers and influencing technical direction.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience defining or scaling AI-assisted development workflows across a team (agents, prompts, tooling, guardrails).
• Python experience (Flask or data tooling) for supporting services.
• Experience with Docker, Kubernetes, and cloud platforms (GCP or AWS).
• Familiarity with front-end build tools (Webpack / Laravel Mix), package managers (Composer, npm), and templating engines (Blade, Twig).
• Experience with event-driven or message-based architectures (e.g., RabbitMQ / AMQP).
• Experience improving observability and monitoring (structured logging, dashboards, tracing).
• Experience modernizing or incrementally refactoring legacy codebases.

Why Join

The people who do best here are builders. They take ownership, move fast, and want to see the direct impact of their work.

• Cross-Functional Impact: Your work on the storefront and operations platform directly affects how customers shop and how internal teams operate - touching product, QA, and engineering leadership daily.
• AI-First Skill Building: This is an AI-development-driven team. You will use modern AI coding tools every day and help define the workflows, patterns, and guardrails that make the whole team more effective.
• End-to-End Ownership: Own architecture decisions, technical direction, and delivery for customer-facing systems. Set the patterns the team builds on and mentor other engineers.
• Competitive Benefits (United States): We offer an attractive benefits package including primarily remote work, private medical and life insurance, additional paid time off, monthly allowances and reimbursements, employee discounts, and opportunities for professional growth.
• Competitive Benefits (Canada): Paid time off policies, RRSP match, medical, dental, and vision coverage, a variety of supplemental benefit options, and employee discounts across our portfolio of brands.

Interview Process

1. Recruiter Screen - A 30-minute conversation with our recruiting team to align on the role, your background, and what you are looking for.
2. Hiring Manager Interview - A deeper conversation with the Manager, MotoSport Technology focused on architecture & ownership, technical leadership / mentorship, and AI-assisted development vision.
3. Technical Discussion Panel - A technical conversation covering Ecommerce system design, PHP/Symfony/Laravel & SQL depth, debugging, and AI-in-practice with an engineering panel.
4. Team Conversation - Discuss collaboration, mentorship, code-review judgment, cross-functional communication with team members across functions.
5. Reference Checks - Conducted in parallel with the final stages where possible.
6. Potential In-Person Interview
7. Offer - We move quickly for the right candidate.

Interview process is subject to change. Any updates will be communicated promptly and clearly.

$75,000 - $105,000 a year

Compensation shown in USD.

For Ontario applicants, please note that this posting is for an existing vacancy.

For US-based candidates, this posting is intended for candidates that reside in the following states:

AZ, DE, FL, GA, IN, LA, MI, MS, MO, NV, NC, OK, PA, TN, TX, UT, WV, WI, and WY.

We may use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support parts of the hiring process, such as reviewing applications, analyzing resumes, or assessing responses and identifying potential inconsistencies or verification signals in application materials based on available information. 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.