Staff Software Engineer

Join a Challenger

Being a traditional bank just isn’t our thing. We are big believers in innovating the banking experience because we believe Canadians deserve better options, and we challenge ourselves and our teams to creatively transform what’s possible in banking. Our team is made up of inquisitive and agile minds that find smarter ways of doing things. If you’re not afraid of taking on big challenges and redefining the future, you belong with us. You’ll get to work with people who will encourage you to reach new heights. We like to keep things fun, ask questions and learn together.

We are a big (and growing!) family. Overall we serve more than 670,000 people across Canada through Equitable Bank, Canada's Challenger Bank™, and have been around for more than 50 years. Equitable Bank's wholly-owned subsidiary, Concentra Bank, supports credit unions across Canada that serve more than six million members. Together we have over $125 billion in combined assets under management and administration, with a clear mandate to drive change in Canadian banking to enrich people's lives. Our customers have named our EQ Bank digital platform (eqbank.ca) one of the top banks in Canada on the Forbes World's Best Banks list since 2021. 

The EQ Bank Engineering Team

EQ Bank Engineering Team has been advocating building best-in-class branchless digital banking experience to advance millions of Canadians’ personal financial goals since its inception. The team believes that the more agile and seamless banking features we build, the more wealth opportunities Canadians can unlock. Engineers in EQ Bank adopt the agile mindset to continually create, test, deploy, improve, and scale banking digital services. Our partnership with Wise, Nesto, Ratehub, Flinks, Borrowell, and Neo Financial has given us top-notch banking consumer insights, and therefore, these insights allow the Engineering Team to build a differentiated and unique digital banking platform. The team is on an 18-to-24-month transformational journey and ready to expand more banking features by growing double-digit team size to triple-digit. Join us to lead engineers on a transformational journey!

Purpose of Job

Staff Software Engineer, Engineering, Digital Banking is part of the team that will enable EQ Bank’s Challenger Bank aspiration: A banking platform to put the power in customers’ hands. Every feature we build is designed to give our customers an edge over their money to maximize their potential. You will use cloud-native technologies and product-centric agile methodologies to manage multiple cross-functional pods dedicated to launching new products, features, and ongoing business value for our digital bank apps.

Reporting to the Associate Director, Software Engineering, Digital Banking, you will help drive forwards the evolution of our Cards and Rewards services platform into a modern, API-driven micro-services architecture using foundational Azure Cloud, DevOps, API, and PaaS services to deliver dozens of production releases per month.  You will work in a cross-functional team through all areas of Agile Software Development and will partner closely with Digital Banking Business and Product teams to prioritize and deliver outcome driven solutions.  This will include enabling MVP approaches and faster learning towards our customer goals and objectives.

The Staff Software Engineer, Engineering will focus on following outcome-based workstyle that can span from working as individual contributor on complex performance investigations to team leader guiding group of developer for software enhancements.

Strong background of agile delivery, architectural and communication skills, SRE techniques and mindset will be exercised with diverse assignment types.

• Design, develop, and implement Java-based solutions using microservices and event-driven architecture.
• Provide architectural leadership to guide the team on best practices for RESTful API design and architectural design patterns.
• Lead efforts to create highly scalable, distributed systems that incorporate microservices and event-drive design paradigms, ensuring resilient and maintainable solutions.
• Be a functional leader in the team, guiding the team with the best practices and technical standards, observability and the SRE practice in general.
• Work closely with product leaders to assess user requirements, supporting design, and contributing to technical specifications.
• Define and evolve the architecture roadmap and establish long-term vision for service platform.
• Lead adoption of architecture principles, technologies, patterns, and governance frameworks across multiple teams and projects, ensuring consistency and scalability.
• Provide technical guidance and mentorship to other developers.
• Develop tools and frameworks to improve developer productivity.
• Support architectural guidance and governance process.
• Automate processes to improve system reliability and performance metrics.
• Conduct code reviews, code audits, and performance tests to ensure the quality and maintainability of the software
• Participate in an on-call production support process

• Posse a degree in Bachelor or Master of Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field.
• Have 10+ years of experience in application development with 5+ year in senior/architectural role
• Proven 5+ years of experience with Java and Spring boot framework, and cloud services (AWS, Azure, GCP).
• Have 4+ years of expertise in RESTful API design and governance with a proven track record of delivering API solutions at scale (1,500 per 10 minutes)
• Have 4+ years of experience with microservices architecture, including containerization and orchestration technologies (i.e. Docker, Kubernetes).
• Strong knowledge of integration patterns, such as message-oriented middleware, publish-subscribe, or event-driven architecture.
• Knowledge of API Gateway (i.e. Istio) to manage microservices communication and security.
• Hands-on experience in the Cards and Rewards domain is highly desirable.
• Ability to lead architectural discussions, design reviews, and enforce governance models to ensure system consistency and integrity.
• Experience with performance tuning, monitoring, and troubleshooting.
• Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines and DevOps tools (Azure DevOps).
• Strong experience in Observability tools and practices (Elastic APM).
• Self-starter who can take a concept and drive it through to the design and implementation.
• Ability to work independently with minimal supervisory direction.
• Strong oral and written communication skills.
• Excellent interpersonal, communication, and presentation skills.

What we offer [For full-time permanent roles]

💰 Competitive discretionary bonus 

✨ Market leading RRSP match program

🩺  Medical, dental, vision, life, and disability benefits

📝  Employee Share Purchase Plan

👶🏽 Maternity/Parental top-up while you care for your little one

🏝 Generous vacation policy and personal days 

🖥  Virtual events to connect with your fellow colleagues

🎓  Annual professional development allowance and a comprehensive Career Development program

💛  A fulfilling opportunity to join one of the top FinTechs and help create a new kind of banking experience

The incumbent will be working hybrid and in office time will be spent working from Equitable Bank’s additional office space located at 351 King Street East, Toronto, ON.

Equitable Bank is deeply committed to inclusion. Our organization is stronger and our employees thrive when we honour and celebrate everyone’s diverse experiences and perspectives. In tandem with that commitment, we support and encourage our staff to grow not just in their career path, but personally as well. 

We commit to providing a barrier-free recruitment process and work environment for all applicants. Please let us know of any accommodations needed so that you can bring your best self to the application process and beyond. All candidates considered for hire must successfully pass a criminal background check and credit check to qualify for hire. While we appreciate your interest in applying, an Equitable recruiter will only contact leading candidates whose skills and qualifications closely match the requirements of the position.

We can’t wait to get to know you!