Sr. Back-end Software Developer

As the largest Canadian-owned and operated K-12 publisher, Nelson Education Ltd. is Canada's only heritage education content provider, known for its innovative products and solutions catering to learners across the country.

Nelson is on a mission to make learning accessible, engaging, and effective for all. That's why Nelson continuously strives to create dynamic curriculum-aligned content that caters to diverse learning styles, fostering critical thinking, creativity, and life-long learning.

In response to the evolving education landscape, Nelson developed Edwin, a digital learning ecosystem. Edwin is a learning platform for classroom success, providing curriculum-linked content, engaging tools and unparalleled support to reach every student.

Nelson is redefining education and making a positive impact on the way knowledge is acquired and shared by creating the possible, one learner at a time.

About the Role

Reporting to the Engineering Manager, the Sr. Back-End Developer (Developer III) is responsible for instrumenting, deploying, and improving multiple public-facing web apps in our cloud-based Kubernetes clusters or Cloudflare edge workers. This role is also responsible to design and develop the services used to support the front-end apps, such as the user auth, APl's, and analytics systems, and is an integral part of our Development team responsible for responding to and diagnosing issues in our production environment.

Key Accountabilities

• Design client-side and service-side architecture.
• Design and develop new features and functionality for web applications using technologies such as Golang, Typescript, gRPC, messages, and caching.
• Write clean, maintainable, and efficient code.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams, including product management and design, to understand requirements and develop solutions.
• Troubleshoot and debug issues as needed.
• Write automated tests to ensure code quality and reliability.
• Continuously improve the development process and best practices.
• Participate in code reviews and mentor junior developers.
• Write effective APIs.
• Create security and data protection settings.
• Write technical documentation.
• Stay current with new and evolving web technologies and techniques.
• Actively participate in the SCRUM process. Our process involves minimally necessary meetings and ceremonies. It’s based on an evolving process directed by the principle of keep what works and change what doesn’t.

Must have

• 5-8 years of experience as a Sr. Developer.
• Extensive experience managing AWS cloud services including EKS, EC2, S3, VPC, SQS, and ElastiCache.
• Strong experience with database systems such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, and MongoDB.
• Familiarity managing docker containers, and hosting services in Kubernetes using Node.js and Golang.
• Experience with Kubernetes container orchestration and maintaining multiple clusters per environment.
• Familiarity with the basic building blocks for setting up services on cloud providers: virtual machines, object storage, network CIDs, and L4 and L7 load balancers.
• BSc. in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a similar field.
• Results-driven and can work independently with minimal supervision.
• Strong communication and documentation skills.
• Strong capacity to handle details; follow through and manage multiple priorities.
  

Nice to have

• Experience with IaC such as OpenTofu or equivalent.
• Familiarity with evolving AI technologies like LLMs and RAG.
• Familiarity with Elastic Stack.
• Familiarity with Octopus Deploy.
• Familiarity with Spacelift.
• Familiarity with Istio service mesh.
• Familiarity with .proto files, code generation, and gRPC microservices.
• Familiarity with testing frameworks such as Storybook and Playwright.
• Experience with Next.js and RSCs.
• Interest or experience with Data Analysis such as Causal Inference analysis, Pre-Post analysis, and Sensitivity analysis.
• Familiarity with GNU/Linux or BSD operation system and shells including ls, ln, cp, mv, chmod, chown, ps, cat, grep, find, sed, and awk commands.
• Interest or experience in other languages being considered for future use such as Zig, Rust, and Gleam.

• Remote-first
• Flexible working time
• Competitive compensation
• Great company culture
• Great benefits and perks, including summer Fridays, partner discounts and more!

Don’t have 100% of the above qualifications? Do you still think Nelson is a great fit for you? We encourage you to apply anyway!

Nelson is an equal opportunity employer and is committed to Inclusion, Equity and Diversity. As part of this commitment, we do not discriminate on the basis of age, race, sex, gender, gender identity, colour, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, marital status, citizenship, veteran status, or disability status.

Should you require any accommodation during the requirement process please reach out to  peopleandengagement@nelson.com.