Senior Backend Engineer

Molecular You

Senior Backend Engineer leading design and implementation of critical systems in a preventive medicine platform. Focused on architectural decisions with global impact on health insights and analytics.

Posted 6/1/2026full-timeVancouver • 🇨🇦 CanadaSeniorWebsite

Tech Stack

Tools & technologies

Distributed SystemsElixirMicroservicesRabbitMQRubyRuby on RailsTerraform

About the role

Key responsibilities & impact

Designing, developing, and maintaining Ruby on Rails services for HIPAA-compliant patient data management, laboratory system integrations, and clinical recommendation engines
Developing Elixir/Phoenix applications utilizing OTP patterns and supervision trees for high-concurrency, fault-tolerant systems requiring 24/7 reliability
Designing and implementing event-driven architectures using RabbitMQ, including defining service boundaries, selecting appropriate consistency models, and establishing retry and error-handling strategies
Managing production infrastructure using Terraform, including capacity planning, high-availability architecture design, and cost optimization
Conducting thorough code reviews focused on architectural quality, system design improvements, technical debt management, and mentoring junior team members
Working across multiple repositories at varying maturity levels, making strategic decisions regarding legacy system refactoring, service consolidation, and microservice extraction
Collaborating with Product and UX teams in six-week ShapeUp development cycles, delivering features while managing underlying technical complexity
Diagnosing and resolving complex distributed system issues including race conditions, message ordering problems, cascading failures, and performance bottlenecks in production environments
Making critical technical decisions regarding database schema evolution, API versioning strategies, and infrastructure changes with significant cost and operational impact
Participating in technical planning during cooldown periods, including technical debt assessment, infrastructure improvement initiatives, and cross-functional prioritization discussions

Requirements

What you’ll need

Minimum 10 years of experience designing, building, and operating production backend systems with demonstrated expertise in architecting resilient, scalable solutions
Extensive production experience with Ruby on Rails framework, including deep understanding of Rails conventions, best practices, and when custom solutions are warranted
Proven experience developing production applications using Elixir/Phoenix, with solid understanding of OTP patterns, concurrency models, and appropriate use cases for Elixir-based architectures
Hands-on production experience with message queues and event-driven architectures (RabbitMQ strongly preferred), including implementing solutions for message ordering, idempotency, dead letter queue handling, and managing distributed messaging complexity
Strong expertise in Terraform and infrastructure-as-code practices, with demonstrated ability to manage production infrastructure, handle state management, and implement reliable, maintainable infrastructure solutions
Proven ability to make sound architectural decisions in ambiguous situations and provide data-driven justification for technical recommendations
Strong troubleshooting skills for complex distributed systems, including request tracing across microservices, log analysis, and systematic problem diagnosis in production environments
Demonstrated technical leadership experience including mentoring engineering team members, establishing and improving engineering practices, and influencing technical strategy
Authorized to work in Canada

Benefits

Comp & perks

Significant architectural ownership and decision-making authority with direct impact on platform scalability and technical direction
Opportunity to build systems that directly impact patient health outcomes and preventive care delivery
Senior-level position with substantial influence over engineering culture, practices, and technical strategy in a growing organization
Exposure to diverse technical challenges including distributed systems architecture, healthcare data compliance (HIPAA/PIPEDA), international scaling, legacy system modernization, and greenfield service development

ATS Keywords

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Hard Skills & Tools

Ruby on RailsElixirPhoenixOTP patternsRabbitMQTerraformevent-driven architecturemicroservicesAPI versioningdatabase schema evolution

Soft Skills

technical leadershipmentoringtroubleshootingproblem diagnosiscollaborationstrategic decision makingarchitectural decision makingcommunicationtechnical debt managementcapacity planning