Principal Backend Engineer, Canada

Who are we?

NovoEd is an enterprise learning platform that helps organizations build critical capabilities at scale through collaborative and experiential learning. Founded in 2012 out of Stanford’s Social Algorithm Laboratory, NovoEd has grown into a trusted partner for many of the world’s leading companies, executive education providers, and training organizations.

Today, NovoEd powers a modern learning ecosystem built around three core experiences: Learning, Mentoring, and Practicing. Our platform enables organizations to deliver cohort-based learning, structured mentorship, and real-world skill application in a single integrated environment—helping employees move beyond passive learning to actively develop and apply new skills.

AI is now a core part of the NovoEd platform. AI helps course creators generate and structure learning content more efficiently, provides learners with personalized insights and feedback, and supports interactive learning experiences such as guided practice, coaching, and role-playing scenarios. These capabilities help organizations scale high-quality learning experiences while maintaining engagement and practical skill development.

By combining collaborative learning design, AI-powered capabilities, and enterprise-grade technology, NovoEd connects global learners, mentors, and leaders in high-impact programs that drive measurable business outcomes. Organizations rely on NovoEd to develop leadership capabilities, accelerate transformation initiatives, and build the skills their workforce needs to succeed in a rapidly evolving world.

Overview

We are seeking a Principal Backend Engineer with deep expertise in backend systems and a strong track record of architecting scalable, reliable platforms. This role is responsible for shaping the technical direction of our backend architecture and helping guide the long-term evolution of our systems as the product and organization grow. In addition to defining architecture, the Principal Engineer owns platform-level outcomes, ensuring that backend systems deliver strong performance, reliability, and scalability that directly support business and product goals.

As a Principal Engineer, you will combine hands-on technical leadership with strategic architectural thinking. You will partner closely with engineering leadership, product teams, and cross-functional stakeholders to design solutions that balance scalability, reliability, and development velocity. In addition to leading complex technical initiatives, you will mentor engineers, influence engineering standards, and help raise the technical bar across the organization. You will also identify and address systemic technical debt that impacts platform performance, reliability, and developer productivity, and drive initiatives that improve the organization’s ability to ship high-quality features faster.

You will also help advance modern engineering practices across the team, including the effective use of AI-assisted development tools and automation to improve developer productivity while maintaining rigorous standards for system design, code quality, and operational reliability.

Key Responsibilities

Architect and Build Scalable Systems

• Design and implement scalable, secure, and maintainable backend systems primarily using Ruby on Rails. Lead the architecture and development of backend services with a strong focus on performance, reliability, and long-term maintainability. Contribute to both new feature development and modernization of legacy systems.
• Use modern development workflows—including AI-assisted coding tools and coding agents—to accelerate development while maintaining rigorous engineering standards. Evaluate and validate AI-generated code to ensure correctness, security, and architectural consistency.

System Integrations & API Development

• Lead the design and development of APIs (REST, GraphQL) that enable reliable communication between internal services and external platforms. Integrate third-party services while ensuring performance, security, and data integrity.
• Collaborate closely with frontend teams to ensure clean service boundaries and consistent system behavior. Use modern tooling and AI-assisted workflows to improve API development, testing, and documentation.

Database Design & Optimization

• Design and optimize relational databases to support high-performance and scalable applications. Ensure schemas, queries, and indexing strategies support complex workloads and evolving product needs.
• Identify and resolve performance bottlenecks using observability tools and modern diagnostics, including AI-assisted analysis when appropriate.

Platform Performance & Engineering Productivity

• Own initiatives that improve platform performance, reliability, and overall engineering productivity. Identify systemic technical debt, architectural constraints, or operational inefficiencies that slow development or impact customer experience, and lead cross-team efforts to address them. Drive improvements to platform capabilities, developer tooling, and system architecture that enable teams to ship high-quality software more efficiently as the platform scales.

Technical Debt Management & Feature Development

• Drive the strategic identification and prioritization of technical debt across the platform. Identify systemic architectural constraints, legacy patterns, or platform-level inefficiencies that impact scalability, development velocity, or customer experience. Partner with engineering leadership and product teams to prioritize remediation efforts based on technical risk and business impact.
• Lead initiatives that modernize critical parts of the system while enabling continued product development. Ensure the platform evolves in a sustainable way by balancing long-term architectural improvements with near-term feature delivery. Provide clear technical direction that helps teams address foundational issues without disrupting product momentum.

Cross-functional Collaboration

• Partner with product managers, frontend engineers, and DevOps teams to align backend systems with product and business goals. Contribute to both technical and product discussions, ensuring backend considerations are represented in decision making.
• Act as a technical leader who helps teams adopt modern development practices, including responsible and effective use of AI-assisted engineering tools.

Process Improvement & Engineering Excellence

• Drive engineering improvements that increase developer productivity and accelerate the delivery of reliable, high-quality features. Identify systemic bottlenecks in development workflows, infrastructure, or platform architecture that slow down teams, and lead initiatives to address them.
• Focus on improving overall engineering effectiveness by evolving development practices, tooling, and platform capabilities that enable teams to move faster while maintaining strong reliability and code quality. This may include advancing CI/CD systems, strengthening observability and testing strategies, and improving internal tooling and developer workflows.
• As a Principal Engineer, you will take a broad view of how engineering systems and processes interact—ensuring that platform architecture, development tooling, and operational practices work together to support feature velocity, platform stability, and long-term maintainability.

Problem Solving & Troubleshooting

• Serve as a technical leader in identifying and addressing complex issues that impact the reliability, performance, and scalability of the platform. Rather than focusing solely on reactive debugging, analyze production incidents and operational patterns to uncover systemic problems affecting the system.
• Lead efforts to implement durable architectural improvements that prevent recurring issues, strengthen platform resilience, and improve observability across services. Partner with engineering and infrastructure teams to proactively identify risks, improve operational practices, and ensure the platform remains reliable as it scales.

AI-Native Engineering Culture

Our engineering team embraces AI as a productivity multiplier while maintaining strong engineering fundamentals. Principal engineers play a key role in shaping how AI is used responsibly and effectively across the organization.

In this role, you will:

• Integrate AI-assisted development tools into daily workflows (code generation, debugging, refactoring, documentation, and testing).
  
  
• Demonstrate strong judgment when evaluating AI-generated code and system designs.
  
  
• Help define best practices for the use of coding agents and AI tooling within the engineering organization.
  
  
• Mentor teammates on how to use AI tools effectively while maintaining high engineering standards.
  
  

Identify opportunities where automation or AI can meaningfully improve developer productivity and system quality.

Required Qualifications

• 12+ years of software development experience with a strong foundation in backend development, including building and maintaining scalable systems.
• 4+ years of hands-on experience with Ruby on Rails in production environments.
• Experience with Sidekiq for background job processing and Redis for caching and queuing systems.
• Proven experience in database design and optimization, particularly with SQL and PostgreSQL.
• Experience developing APIs (REST or GraphQL) and integrating with third-party systems or services.
• Proficiency with Docker for containerization and familiarity with AWS infrastructure for deployment and scaling.
• Experience managing technical debt while continuing to deliver new features.
• Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines, automated testing strategies, and backend development best practices.
• Strong understanding of system architecture, infrastructure, and deployment strategies using Docker and AWS.
• Must have Computer Science or Engineering degree
• Demonstrated fluency with modern AI-assisted development workflows, including coding assistants or autonomous coding agents.
• Experience incorporating AI-enabled tools into daily engineering workflows while critically evaluating their outputs.

Soft Skills

• Strong problem-solving skills and ability to diagnose complex backend issues and performance bottlenecks.
• Ability to collaborate effectively with cross-functional teams and communicate technical concepts clearly.
• Self-motivated with strong ownership of backend systems and technical outcomes.
• High attention to detail and commitment to delivering maintainable, high-quality solutions.
• Ability to influence engineering practices and promote responsible adoption of modern development tools, including AI.

Bonus Skills

• Experience designing and evolving large-scale distributed systems or platform architectures.
  
  
• Strong understanding of modern frontend ecosystems (e.g., React or Angular) and how they integrate with backend services and APIs.
  
  
• Experience with DevOps practices, infrastructure automation, and improving reliability, observability, and deployment workflows.
  
  
• Demonstrated ability to influence technical direction, mentor engineers, and raise engineering standards across teams.
  
  
• Experience building or improving developer platforms, internal tooling, or engineering productivity systems.
  
  
• Familiarity with AI-assisted development tools, coding agents, or automation frameworks, and an interest in advancing how engineering teams leverage modern development tooling.
  
  
• Experience working in high-scale SaaS environments serving enterprise customers.

Why Join Us?

At NovoEd, you will help shape the technology behind a platform used by some of the world’s leading organizations to develop talent and drive meaningful business outcomes. Our team is passionate about building products that make learning more collaborative, practical, and impactful.

As part of our engineering team, you’ll work on complex technical challenges across a platform that supports global programs, large-scale collaboration, and increasingly AI-powered learning experiences. You’ll collaborate with thoughtful teammates, contribute to systems that power real-world learning and development, and have the opportunity to influence the evolution of a growing multi-product platform spanning Learning, Mentoring, and Practicing.

We value curiosity, craftsmanship, and a culture of continuous improvement. Engineers at NovoEd are encouraged to explore new ideas, adopt modern tools and practices, and build solutions that deliver long-term value for our customers.

If you’re excited about building meaningful software, working with talented colleagues, and helping organizations develop the skills needed for the future of work, we’d love to hear from you.

NovoEd is an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees and applicants. Employment decisions are made without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state, or local laws. This policy applies to all aspects of employment, including recruiting.