Staff Engineer

Vantage

$135K — $160K *
US-AnywhereRemote in Toronto, ON
Enterprise Technology
8 - 10 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 9+ years of professional experience in software development, testing, software design, and architecture.
  • Deep knowledge of the full production stack including frontend, backend, infrastructure, and data.
  • Proven experience with multi-team technical roadmaps, securing buy-in and executing to completion.
  • Expertise in managing technical debt as a defined program of work.
  • Solid background in designing and operating B2B API integrations across various complexities.
  • Proven experience in mentoring senior engineers in architectural thinking and review processes.
  • Familiarity with CI tooling, Docker, and major cloud platforms like Azure, AWS, or GCP.
  • Extensive experience with Python and Django in building production services.

Responsibilities

  • Lead the design and implementation of multiple significant technical initiatives concurrently, remaining engaged in both coding and architecture.
  • Provide strategic technical direction that balances immediate delivery with long-term sustainability, ensuring architectural alignment over time.
  • Manage technical debt proactively by identifying, quantifying, and prioritizing it in collaboration with leadership and product teams.
  • Facilitate knowledge sharing through Architecture Office Hours, Lunch and Learns, and internal documentation to align teams with the technical roadmap.
  • Mentor engineers, including senior engineers, to foster growth and development within the department.
  • Serve as a quality gatekeeper through thorough code reviews and testing strategies.

Benefits

  • Remote-first work culture with flexibility to work from any location.
  • Home office support to enhance productivity and comfort.
  • Opportunities for team members to participate in annual company retreats.
  • Collaborative environment fostering connectivity despite geographical distances.
Full Job Description
About the Role

Vantage is hiring a Staff Engineer. You help set technical strategy across teams and deliver it through direct implementation, broad technical leadership, or both.

As a Staff Engineer, you drive the technical roadmap multiple teams build against, and you're accountable for it landing. You influence peers and senior leadership to get behind it. You clear cross-team dependencies before integration points turn into delays or crunch, and you build the frameworks and processes teams use to stay aligned without needing you in the room.

You stay hands-on, leading several significant initiatives in parallel. Your depth spans the whole stack, frontend through data, and you use that breadth to define SLAs and observability standards. You own technical debt management and give technical direction that balances what we need to ship this quarter against what we need to still be true in three years.

You raise the bar of the whole engineering team through mentorship, design review, and pairing

Minimum Requirements
  • 9+ years of professional experience with a strong record in software development, testing, software design, and architecture.
  • Very deep knowledge of a full production stack: frontend, backend, infrastructure, and data. You can explain how a choice in one layer shows up as a problem in another, and you design accordingly.
  • Track record of owning a multi-quarter technical roadmap that spanned more than one team, including securing buy-in from engineering peers and senior leadership and driving it to completion.
  • Experience managing technical debt as an explicit program of work: quantifying it, prioritizing it, making the business and developer-experience case to leadership, and landing it in a roadmap alongside product commitments.
  • Experience designing and operating B2B API integrations: authentication, rate limiting, retries, idempotency, versioning, and contract evolution.
  • Track record of mentoring senior engineers, not just junior ones, including through architectural thinking and not only code review.
  • Experience with CI tooling, Docker, and cloud platforms such as Azure, AWS, or GCP.
  • Experience evaluating and rolling out developer tooling, including AI-assisted development tools, with a clear view of where they earn their keep and where they introduce risk to code quality, review discipline, or data handling.
  • Deep Python and Django experience building production services
  • A degree in Computer Science or a related field

Role Responsibilities
  • Lead the design and implementation of multiple significant technical initiatives in parallel, staying hands-on in the code and the architecture.
  • Provide technical direction that balances short-term delivery against long-term sustainability, and make sure architectural decisions across teams remain consistent over time.
  • Own technical debt management. Surface the debt that matters, build the case for it in business and developer-experience terms, take it to leadership, and work with Product to get it prioritized in quarterly goals.
  • Use forums such as Architecture Office Hours, Lunch and Learns, internal talks, and the wiki to spread context, enforce industry best practices, and keep teams aligned to the technical roadmap.
  • Mentor engineers across the department, including senior engineers, in partnership with their managers. Create growth opportunities for others rather than absorbing the interesting work yourself.
  • Act as a quality gatekeeper through active code review and testing strategy, and deliberately enable other engineers to become effective reviewers and gatekeepers themselves.

Remote-First, Based in Toronto
Vantage is proudly headquartered in Toronto, but we're a remote-first team spread across North America (and beyond). Our flexible work philosophy means team members can thrive from wherever they do their best work-whether that's from a home office, a local café, or while adding stamps to their passport. With a remote-friendly setup, home office support, and annual company retreats, we stay connected, collaborative, and energized-no matter the time zone.

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