Kano
Staff Software Architect
British Columbia · Staff+
Work authorization required$140k-$200kDetected 76 days ago
JavaScriptPHPHTMLCode ReviewGitMySQLMongoDBVector DatabasesAWSTerraformCI/CDGitHub ActionsPrometheusGrafanaDatadogDevOpsSite Reliability EngineeringMachine LearningLLMsCybersecurityIncident ResponseJiraLoad TestingUnity
About the role
- You'll spend roughly 60% of your time in the codebase-writing code, reviewing pull requests, prototyping solutions-and 40% setting architectural direction, mentoring senior engineers, and driving engineering standards.
- If your last few years have been mostly meetings, slide decks, and delegation, this isn't the right fit.
- If you love going deep on hard problems and making an entire engineering org better through your craft, read on.
Responsibilities
- Design and build backend systems, services, and APIs that support our live games at scale. You write production code regularly.
- Own system architecture decisions-data modeling, service boundaries, caching strategies, async processing-and implement the critical paths yourself.
- Drive code quality through hands-on code review, pairing with senior engineers, and establishing patterns that the team adopts because they're clearly better.
- Mentor Tech Leads and senior engineers through design reviews, architecture discussions, and direct feedback on their work. Build a culture of clear ownership and shipping.
- Define SLOs, error budgets, and on-call expectations. Lead incident response when things break and drive post-incident reviews that result in durable fixes.
- Partner with Product, Finance, and Legal to keep technical plans aligned with business goals. Translate engineering trade-offs into business language.
- Own the SR&ED engineering process-eligibility gates in Jira, contemporaneous notes, artifact capture-partnering with Finance on claims.
- Lead the integration of LLMs and Generative AI into our game loops and internal tooling. Build the scaffolding for AI-driven features (e.g., dynamic content, automated moderation, or player support agents).
- Build and improve observability-structured logging, metrics, traces, error monitoring-so the team can debug fast and ship with confidence.
Requirements
- 10+ years in software engineering, with at least 3 years as a staff/principal-level IC who stayed hands-on
- Deep experience with high-availability, high-throughput consumer-facing systems
- Infrastructure-as-code proficiency (Terraform or CDK) and CI/CD tooling (GitHub Actions or equivalent)
- Experience owning security and privacy posture in a platform-reviewed environment
- Production experience using AI to accelerate development and operations
- Proven experience integrating AI/ML into production environments (e.g., working with OpenAI API, LangChain, or vector databases).
- Experience running SR&ED or similar R&D incentive programs
- Your leverage comes from your craft, your judgment, and your ability to multiply the people around you.
- Must be legally eligible to work in Canada.**
- Must-Haves
- Recent, demonstrable production coding-you can point to systems you personally designed AND built in the last 2 years
- Strong AWS background (IAM, VPC, ECS/Fargate, S3, KMS, and security tooling like GuardDuty, Security Hub, CloudTrail)
- SRE fundamentals: SLOs, incident management, load testing, graceful degradation
- Data architecture across relational and non-relational systems
- Observability stack experience (e.g., Graylog, OpenTelemetry, Prometheus/Grafana, Datadog, Sentry)
- Clear communicator who can influence across product, engineering, legal, and finance without positional authority
- Nice-to-Haves
Skills
- Champion FinOps: monitor cloud spend, right-size infrastructure, and report on cost vs. performance.
Compensation
- ($140,000 - $200,000)
- The listed pay range reflects the potential earnings for this role.
- Actual compensation will depend on experience, skills, and alignment with company needs, typically falling toward the midpoint for most candidates
- 12 paid Care Days per year
Benefits
- Health, dental and vision benefits
- 3 weeks vacation to start
- Paid holiday shutdown in December
- Opportunity to work on game projects that are enjoyed by millions of players worldwide!
- That's why we look for the best and brightest to join our team; people who have talent, vision, and commitment.
- 2022 Best Workplace™ for Mental Wellness
- 2020 Best Workplaces™ for Mental Wellness
Company info
- Ability to make a difference.
This listing is sourced directly from Kano's careers page and normalized into a canonical job model.