Senior Backend Engineer

Are you a Backend Engineer who thrives on designing systems that are fast, reliable, and built to scale? We're looking for a Senior Backend Engineer to join us at Thinkific.

In this role, you'll work on our platform team to design and enhance backend systems that power our core platform, improve reliability and performance. You will collaborate closely with our SREs and feature teams to evolve our technical foundation. You'll tackle challenging problems across data modeling, system design, API performance, and developer experience, helping Thinkific scale for millions of creators and learners.

Your goal will be to lead and deliver high-impact projects within your technical domain while mentoring others and setting strong engineering standards. Here's how you will accomplish this: 

• Design, implement, and optimize backend systems and APIs that power Thinkific's platform at scale
• Improve system reliability and performance across services, databases, and application layers
• Collaborate with SRE and feature teams to evolve our architecture, focusing on observability, reliability, and performance at scale
• Design and maintain database schemas, queries, and indexing strategies for high performance and data integrity
• Use containerized development workflows (Docker, Kubernetes) and CI/CD pipelines to deliver reliable, testable code
• Conducting performance investigations and tuning queries, APIs, and background jobs
• Instrument code and systems with metrics, logs, and traces using tools like Datadog, New Relic, or Prometheus
• Write high-quality, maintainable Ruby (Rails) and/or code and review peers' code for correctness, scalability, and performance
• Mentor engineers, sharing best practices, and helping drive technical direction across the team

The person we have in mind likely:

• Has 5+ years of experience building and maintaining production web applications
• Is skilled in Ruby on Rails 
• Has deep experience with PostgreSQL or similar relational databases, particularly with schema design and query optimization
• Understands containerization and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes) and modern CI/CD pipelines
• Has experience designing and maintaining APIs (REST and/or GraphQL) in production
• Understands distributed systems concepts like caching, background jobs, queues, and message passing
• Cares about system reliability and has collaborated with SRE or platform teams to improve it
• Communicates clearly and can translate complex technical concepts for cross-functional partners
• Mentors others and contributes to a culture of technical excellence and continuous improvement
• Loves to learn and grow. They've found (and keep looking for) ways to level up their skills in this field, whether that's through formal education, gaining professional experience, or maybe even building their own business 

These things would also be nice, but we think you could learn them on the job: 

• Familiarity with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Helm)
• Knowledge of AWS services such as RDS, S3, and ALB
• Experience improving developer experience or CI/CD reliability
• Understanding of Cloudflare/CDN configuration and caching strategies
• Familiarity with developer tooling and DevEx focused improvements

We're committed to fair and transparent pay that reflects both where you are and where you can grow to. This role has a salary range of $120,000-150,000-170,000 CAD. CAD in Canada, designed to capture the full journey from developing skills to excelling in the position. Most new hires start between the minimum and midpoint, which aligns with being fully capable in the role. Salaries above the midpoint are typically reserved for team members who have demonstrated strong, consistent performance, deep expertise, and a significant positive impact within the role.

For high-demand or hard-to-fill positions like this one, we may hire above midpoint for candidates who bring exceptional experience, skills, or impact potential.

Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging & Accessibility

This is just our initial idea of who we're looking for At Thinkific, we know that people have unique career journeys. If your experience is close to what we've described but you feel that you might be missing a few of the requirements, please still apply We believe in equal opportunity and are committed to diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging across every facet of our business.