Movable Ink

Platform for personalized, integrated marketing content

Lead Backend Engineer - Distributed Systems

Backend EngineeringConfirmed live in the last 24 hours

Full-timeToronto, ON, CanadaRemote

About the Job

Requirements

At least 7 years of software engineering experience focused on distributed systems.
Deep experience designing, building, and operating large-scale distributed systems that are fault tolerant, highly available, and highly concurrent.
Strong systems thinking and sound architectural judgment for event-driven, stateful, real-time decisioning systems.
Ability to identify core primitives, make architectural choices under uncertainty, and adapt designs as requirements evolve.
Experience building and operating backend services in a modern cloud environment, including Google Cloud Platform, and proficiency with Kubernetes.
Hands-on experience with microservice and service-oriented architectures and synchronous, event-sourced, orchestrated, and asynchronous inter-service communication patterns, including gRPC and Kafka.
Strong foundation in Python.
Practical experience evaluating and designing for distributed systems fundamentals, including consensus, partitioning, replication, back-pressure, idempotency, and failure handling.
Strong software engineering practices in system design, code review, testing, and CI/CD.
Strong operational excellence skills, including observability, incident response, and healthy on-call practices.
Strong technical leadership, including driving architectural decisions, leading design reviews, and mentoring engineers.
Ability to identify, analyze, and resolve complex issues in production systems.
Ability to communicate technical tradeoffs clearly and translate them into practical decisions with product and engineering stakeholders.

Responsibilities

Set the technical direction by leading architecture, design, and critical implementation decisions to take the orchestration platform from prototype to production.
Design and build a scalable, event-driven, fault-tolerant distributed system that processes high-volume, real-time messaging decisions across workflows and channels.
Own key system components end-to-end, from architecture and implementation through deployment, monitoring, and incident response.
Conduct design reviews, resolve architectural tradeoffs, and uphold standards for system design, code quality, testing, and operational rigor.
Collaborate with Product, Machine Learning, Data Platform, and adjacent engineering teams to translate complex requirements into clear technical designs with realistic paths to production.
Ensure the platform operates reliably at scale through observability, metrics, incident response practices, and shared on-call responsibilities for business-critical services.
Mentor engineers and model strong engineering practices as the team's senior technical voice.

Desired Qualifications

Experience with Elixir, or transferable experience with Erlang, Scala/Akka, Go, or Clojure.
Experience with workflow orchestration systems such as Prefect, Airflow, Dagster, or Temporal.
Experience building, operating, or integrating with machine-learning-driven decisioning or scoring systems.

Movable Ink scales content personalization for marketers through data-activated content generation and AI decisioning. The world’s most innovative brands rely on Movable Ink to maximize revenue, simplify workflow and boost marketing agility. Headquartered in New York City with close to 600 employees, Movable Ink serves its global client base with operations throughout North America, Central America, Europe, Australia, and Japan.

Movable Ink is standing up a new Orchestration team to build the next-generation AI decisioning layer that coordinates every message a brand sends across email, mobile, and other channels. We are looking for a Lead Engineer to set the technical direction for this platform, partner closely with the team's Engineering Manager and senior technical stakeholders to shape its architecture, and lead the hands-on design and implementation of the system from prototype to production. This is a deeply technical, high-ownership role at the intersection of distributed systems and machine learning, with high executive visibility and the opportunity to shape one of the most strategic engineering investments at the company.

This role will be reporting to the Engineering Manager of the Orchestration team.

Responsibilities:

Set the Technical Direction: lead the architecture, design, and critical implementation decisions that take the orchestration platform from prototype to production
Build the Platform: design and build a scalable, event-driven, fault-tolerant distributed system that processes high-volume real-time messaging decisions across workflows and channels
Own Key System Components End-to-End: from architecture and implementation through deployment, monitoring, and incident response
Drive Hard Technical Decisions: conduct design reviews, resolve architectural tradeoffs, and hold the team to high standards for system design, code quality, testing, and operational rigor
Partner Across the Platform: collaborate closely with Product, Machine Learning, Data Platform, and adjacent engineering teams to translate complex requirements into clear technical designs with realistic paths to production
Drive Operational Excellence: ensure the platform operates reliably at scale through strong observability, metrics, incident response practices, and shared on-call responsibilities for business-critical services
Mentor and Model: serve as the senior technical voice on the team, mentoring engineers and modeling strong engineering practices

Qualifications:

7+ years of software engineering experience with a focus on distributed systems
Deep experience designing, building, and operating large-scale distributed systems that are fault tolerant, highly available, and highly concurrent
Strong systems thinking, with sound architectural judgment around event-driven, stateful, real-time decisioning systems
Skill at building complex systems: identifying core primitives, making sound architectural choices under uncertainty, and adapting designs as requirements evolve
Experience building and operating backend services in a modern cloud environment (we use Google Cloud Platform), including proficiency with container orchestration (we use Kubernetes)
Hands-on experience with microservice and service-oriented architectures, including the inter-service communication patterns that compose them — synchronous, event-sourced, orchestrated, and asynchronous (we use gRPC and Kafka)
Strong foundation in Python
Experience with Elixir — which we use for building concurrent, fault-tolerant services — is a strong plus. Experience with Erlang, Scala/Akka, Go, or Clojure also transfers well
Practical experience evaluating and designing for distributed systems fundamentals: consensus, partitioning, replication, back-pressure, idempotency, and failure handling
Exemplary software engineering practices (system design, code review, testing, CI/CD)
Strong focus on operational excellence, including observability, incident response, and healthy on-call practices
Strong technical leadership skills, with the ability to drive architectural decisions, lead design reviews, and mentor other engineers
Exceptional problem-solving skills, including the ability to efficiently identify, analyze, and resolve complex issues in production systems
Clear communicator who can translate technical tradeoffs into practical decisions with product and engineering stakeholders
(Nice to have) Experience with workflow orchestration systems (e.g. Prefect, Airflow, Dagster, Temporal)
(Nice to have) Experience building, operating, or integrating with ML-driven decisioning or scoring systems

The base pay range for this position is $147,300 - $192,000 CAD/year, which can include additional bonus depending on the position ultimately offered, in addition to a full range of medical, financial, and/or other benefits. The base pay offered may vary depending on job-related knowledge, skills, and experience.

Studies have shown that women, communities of color, and historically underrepresented people are less likely to apply to jobs unless they meet every single qualification. We are committed to building a diverse and inclusive culture where all Inkers can thrive. If you’re excited about the role but don’t meet all of the abovementioned qualifications, we encourage you to apply. Our differences bring a breadth of knowledge and perspectives that makes us collectively stronger.

We welcome and employ people regardless of race, color, gender identity or expression, religion, genetic information, parental or pregnancy status, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, ethnicity, family or marital status, physical and mental ability, political affiliation, disability, Veteran status, or other protected characteristics. We are proud to be an equal opportunity employer.

About the Company

Movable Ink

Platform for personalized, integrated marketing content

Movable Ink helps brands deliver personalized marketing content by connecting with existing marketing tech via an Integrations Exchange. It sells subscriptions to a platform that lets marketers create customized experiences across digital channels. The product works by integrating with widely used marketing tools, pulling audience data, and generating dynamic, personalized messages and visuals that are delivered through emails, webpages, or ads. What sets Movable Ink apart from competitors is its emphasis on seamless integrations with a broad set of marketing technologies and a library of ready-made templates and workshops that help teams accelerate value from their current tech stack. The company’s goal is to help marketers stand out in a crowded digital landscape by making it easy to craft engaging, personalized content at scale and to extract insights and trends via reports and workshops.

Company size: 501-1,000
Company stage: Series D
Total funding: $97.3M
Headquarters: New York City, New York
Founded: 2010

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