Staff Software Engineer – Python in Vancouver

Location: Vancouver, BC – 3 days a week onsite

Overview: As a Staff Software Engineer on the AI team, you will serve as the technical anchor for our machine learning initiatives. You will focus on the architectural integrity, scalability, and long-term vision of our AI-enabled product suite. You will bridge the gap between complex Data Science research and robust, production-grade engineering. You will act as a primary consultant to both the Architecture and Product teams, ensuring that our infrastructure for language detection, sentiment analysis, and machine translation is not just functional but world-class in terms of latency, cost-efficiency, and reliability.

What You’ll Do:

• Architectural Steering: Lead the design and evolution of high-throughput ML inference pipelines. You will define how our microservices scale to meet the demands of tens of thousands of global users.
• MLOps Leadership: Own the “path to production” for machine learning models. You will design the frameworks that allow Data Scientists to deploy, monitor, and version models (MLflow/Kubernetes) with minimal friction.
• Engineering Excellence: Set the gold standard for Python development. You will introduce advanced patterns for asynchronous programming and multi-threaded processing to optimize NLP workloads.
• Cross-Functional Strategy: Partner with Product Owners and Data Scientists to evaluate the technical feasibility of new AI initiatives, ensuring business requirements align with system capabilities.
• Force Multiplier: Beyond standard mentoring, you will cultivate an engineering culture of rigor. You will lead deep-dive design reviews, drive the adoption of TDD at scale, and eliminate systemic technical debt.

Tech Stack & Environment:

• Primary: Python (Expert), C++, Bash.
• AI/ML Infrastructure: MLflow, Model Serving (Triton/BentoML), Feature Stores.
• Orchestration & Cloud: OpenShift, Kubernetes, Docker.
• Communication: REST, JSON, Thrift, gRPC.
• Methodology: Agile, CI/CD, TDD, Microservices.

What You Must Have:

• 12+ years of professional software development experience, with a heavy emphasis on shipping enterprise-grade backend systems.
• Mastery of Python: Deep expertise in the Python ecosystem, including performance profiling, memory management, and advanced concurrency (AsyncIO, multiprocessing).
• Distributed Systems Expert: Proven track record of designing and maintaining microservices architectures that support high-concurrency and high-availability requirements.
• Strategic Mentorship: Experience mentoring Senior-level engineers and influencing technical direction across multiple pods or teams.
• Advanced Technical Skills: Significant experience deploying and monitoring ML models in production environments; understanding the nuances of “Model Drift” and inference optimization.
• Infrastructure as Code: Deep familiarity with container orchestration (Kubernetes/OpenShift) and automating complex deployment lifecycles.
• High-Performance Computing: Ability to step into C++ or lower-level optimizations when Python hits a performance ceiling.
• Data Fluency: Strong grasp of data structures and algorithms specifically tailored for processing large-scale NLP datasets.

The “Staff” Edge (Preferred):

• Experience building or significantly scaling an internal ML Platform or MLOps toolset.
• Background in NLP-specific engineering challenges (e.g., tokenization at scale, vector database integration).
• History of driving “buy vs. build” analyses for critical infrastructure components.

Salary Range: $180-$200k CAD

Thank you for your interest in this opportunity. If you are selected to move forward in the process, we will contact you directly. If you do not hear from us, we encourage you to continue visiting our website for other roles that may be a good fit.