Staff Software Engineer, Backend

Genius AI builds technology and products that help local businesses automate administrative work such as booking, marketing, client management, finances, and inventory management. The Staff Backend Engineer will provide architectural direction for AI-powered products and 0-to-1 initiatives, integrate LLMs into production systems, build proof-of-concepts, and guide technical execution across teams.

Responsibilities:

• Architect and own the technical direction of AI-powered products and 0-to-1 builds, weighing long-term trade-offs with precision and keeping a healthy backlog of forward-looking, build-ready work
• Integrate AI models and LLMs into customer-facing products, not as experiments, but as production systems with real reliability and performance requirements
• Shape how Genius AI builds with AI, your architectural decisions will define what's possible across the product for years
• Write high-quality code and rapidly ship proof-of-concepts to validate architectural options and tackle the team's hardest technical challenges before they become blockers
• Partner with Product, Design, and Engineering leadership to translate ambiguous business goals into well-architected initiatives with clear sequencing and minimal rework
• Proactively identify and resolve systemic technical debt before it slows the team down, unblock engineers, raise the quality bar, and make the people around you disproportionately more effective

Requirements:

• This role is remote in the Greater Toronto Area
• 7+ years of professional engineering experience with a strong backend focus, and a track record of owning system design and architectural choices for high-scale or high-growth products
• Already building with AI as a structural part of how you work, you've integrated LLMs into production systems, used AI tooling to accelerate your development workflow, and have a sharp point of view on where AI changes what's architecturally possible
• Ship fast and course-correct, you're comfortable making architectural calls with incomplete information, iterating rapidly in production, and treating ambiguity as a feature of early-stage work, not a reason to slow down
• Solid command of modern cloud infrastructure: AWS and Kubernetes, at the level of someone who can navigate it confidently without being a pure infra specialist
• Natural collaborator who can align PMs, designers, and engineering teams around a shared technical vision and keep execution moving without friction
• Exceptional communicator who can make complex architectural trade-offs legible to both engineers and non-technical stakeholders
• Deep Kotlin expertise with strong intuitions about backend architecture, service design, and performance at scale (TypeScript experience is a plus)