Senior Backend Engineer
Thinkific is a learning commerce platform. We unite community, courses, and content with commerce, so experts and businesses can create transformative learning experiences to grow their revenue. We build products that create impact and raise the bar on what’s possible through online learning.
Our team of 300+ Thinkers supports learning businesses around the globe, while working collaboratively to learn, grow, and succeed together. Join us to see how we’re building one of the best workplaces in North American tech!
We believe every candidate should have a fair, inclusive, and overall great experience when exploring a new role with Thinkific. Our hiring team is here to guide you through each step, so you always know what to expect!
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 Node.js 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 $120,000-150,000-180,000 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.
What you can expect if you join Thinkific:
👏 An amazing team of talented, passionate, and kind Thinkers. Together, we’ve built an amazing, award-winning culture—we’re a Certified Great Place to Work and one of Canada’s Most Admired Corporate Cultures by Waterstone!
🚀 The chance to build, improve, and innovate on a platform that’s driving positive impact for thousands of businesses and millions of students around the world.
💸 A competitive compensation package including base salary, equity, team-wide bonuses, and an Employee Share Purchase Plan.
🌴Flexible Paid Time Off to maintain mental and physical health. Our team is encouraged to take a minimum 4 weeks of vacation, plus Thinker Holidays (extended long weekends in the summer) and time off for the December holiday season.
🩺 Health Benefits and Wellness: Comprehensive benefits starting on Day 1 include health, vision, and dental coverage for you and your family, $3,000 for mental health care, a short-term health plan, and an additional health or personal spending account. Plus, family friendly benefits include generous parental leave top-ups for up to 32 weeks, as well as fertility coverage and personalized return to work options.
💻 Flexible Work. Choose to work from home from anywhere in Canada, at our Vancouver HQ, a co-working space, or anywhere there’s wifi for a change of scenery.
⬆️ Learning & Growth. An annual $1500 USD Learn and Grow fund for conferences, seminars, or courses, plus training, mentorship, coaching, and internal promotion opportunities.
🏡 A home office setup so you’re ready to succeed with a company-owned Macbook Pro and a budget to order a desk, chair, or any accessories to help you work comfortably and productively.
💙 A place where you can bring your whole self to work. We know that different perspectives lead to amazing ideas, more innovation, and, ultimately, our success as a company. We welcome applicants of all backgrounds, experiences, beliefs, identities, and statuses. Whoever you are—we can't wait to meet you!
The Thinkific Vancouver office operates on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and Sel̓íl̓witulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations of the Coast Salish People. We encourage everyone to learn more about the original caretakers of the land that you currently occupy.
