Staff Software Engineer - II (KeyCite)

Description

You will lead large, business-critical engineering projects from design through to production, and modernise long-running platforms without losing the reliability customers rely on. You will also set technical direction across several teams.

The company supplies trusted content and technology to professionals in legal, tax, accounting, compliance, government and media, and reports world news. Its software and data help clients make informed decisions and support fair, transparent institutions.

The company has about 26,000 staff in more than 70 countries. Work is organised around flexible arrangements, and the team says it is committed to objectivity, accuracy, fairness and transparency.

The company values diverse backgrounds and considers candidates regardless of race, colour, sex or gender (including pregnancy), gender identity or expression, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, disability, age, marital status, citizenship, veteran status or other legally protected status. It is an Equal Employment Opportunity employer and runs a drug-free workplace.

Reasonable accommodations are available for qualified people with disabilities and for sincerely held religious beliefs, in line with the law.

Responsibilities

• Design and deliver end-to-end solutions for large, business-critical systems.
• Modernise core KeyCite platforms and services with current architectural patterns, keeping customer-facing products running throughout.
• Design distributed services, data processing systems and APIs that are fast, highly available, scalable and easy to maintain.
• Make architecture decisions for complex systems, weighing near-term delivery against long-term sustainability.
• Build scalable data processing for large volumes of structured and unstructured legal content and metadata.
• Find architectural constraints and simplify, modernise or replace components, while teams keep delivering value.
• Evaluate new technologies and approaches by their measurable effect on scalability, reliability, developer productivity and customer outcomes.
• Promote modern practices in design, development, testing, observability, security, deployment and operations.
• Set measurable standards for quality, reliability, security and maintainability.
• Work with engineering teams, Product and Architecture on problems that cross team and system boundaries.
• Shape long-term technical strategy with engineering and product leadership.
• Create patterns and standards that other teams adopt.
• Serve as the technical authority on complex architecture and engineering decisions.
• Mentor engineers and grow senior talent.
• Lead technical discussions and design reviews, and raise the engineering bar across the organisation.
• Explain complex technical ideas clearly to senior technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Turn business and product requirements into durable technical architectures.
• Balance feature delivery, modernisation and technical debt with sound judgement.
• Reuse platform capabilities instead of building one-off solutions.
• Tie technical investment to measurable product and business outcomes.
• Keep reliability and accuracy at the centre of systems that support professional research.

Requirements

• At least 6 years designing and delivering complex production software.
• Deep experience in backend and distributed systems engineering.
• Strong experience with cloud-native architectures, preferably on AWS.
• Experience designing APIs, services and event-driven architectures.
• Experience with large-scale data processing and pipelines.
• Solid understanding of reliability, scalability, performance and observability.
• Experience modernising complex legacy or long-lived production systems without disrupting existing customers.
• Strong programming skills, ideally in Java and/or Python.
• Experience with modern engineering practices, such as automated testing, CI/CD, infrastructure automation and production monitoring.
• Proven ability to shape architecture and technical direction beyond your own team.
• Ability to work independently through ambiguous, highly complex technical problems.
• Strong communication skills, including explaining architectural trade-offs to technical and non-technical audiences.
• Experience mentoring senior engineers and raising technical standards across teams.
• Optional: experience with high-volume content, publishing, search or information-processing platforms.
• Optional: experience with search and information retrieval technologies.
• Optional: experience with large-scale metadata or knowledge systems.
• Optional: experience with graph or relationship-oriented data models.
• Optional: experience building platforms or services used by multiple products and engineering teams.
• Optional: experience running highly available, business-critical systems.
• Optional: exposure to legal technology, professional information or other domains where accuracy, provenance and reliability are critical.
• Optional: familiarity with AI-enabled applications and the backend and data infrastructure behind them.

Conditions

The role is hybrid for office-based staff, with a flexible setup that works both digitally and in person.

The position is open because of an existing vacancy, to meet changing business needs.

The base pay range for Ontario, Canada is $148,800 CAD to $198,800 CAD. Pay within the range depends on knowledge, skills and experience, with attention to internal equity.

The role may also be eligible for an annual bonus based on company and individual performance.

The company discloses pay ranges as local law requires, and the range varies by location.

An AI system screens applications against the listed requirements and passes results to recruiters for review, and a person makes the final decision on whether you are considered. You can opt out.

Benefits

• Flexible working, including the option to work from anywhere for up to 8 weeks per year.
• Flex My Way policies to help balance caring, community and personal responsibilities.
• Continuous learning and skills-first programmes to help you grow, lead and adapt to AI-enabled work.
• Flexible vacation, two company-wide Mental Health Days off, a Headspace app subscription, retirement savings, tuition reimbursement, employee incentive programmes, and support for mental, physical and financial wellbeing.
• Two paid volunteer days off each year, plus pro-bono consulting and ESG initiatives through the Social Impact Institute.
• Part of a total reward package that includes flexible benefits and wellbeing programmes alongside base pay.