What you get to do:
Lead, coach, and develop a team of engineers; provide continuous feedback, career development support, and performance management. Foster a culture of ownership, operational excellence, and continuous improvement. Hire, onboard, and retain top engineering talent; build a high-trust, high-performance team. Own end-to-end delivery: scoping, planning, execution, release readiness, and post-release measurement/iteration. Partner with Product to manage the team backlog, clarify requirements, define success metrics, and ensure the team is focused on the highest-value work. Drive healthy agile practices (grooming, estimation, prioritization) and continuously improve predictability and throughput. Provide technical direction and oversight: system design, architecture decisions, design reviews, and non-functional requirements (performance, scalability, security). Maintain a strong technical skillset and contribute where appropriate (reviews, design, incident support, occasional hands-on contributions). Champion simplification/modernization by identifying tech debt, legacy risks, and opportunities to improve maintainability and system efficiency. Own reliability for the team’s services: monitoring, alerting, incident response, and post-incident learning (RCA/postmortems). Monitor system performance and proactively identify “damage indicators” before they become customer-impacting issues. Ensure high-quality technical documentation (TRDs, diagrams, flowcharts, runbooks) and knowledge transfer to support scale and onboarding. Demonstrated experience using AI tools to improve developer productivity, code quality, and delivery. Establish team practices for safe and effective AI usage (code review standards, security/privacy considerations, validation/testing expectations, and “trust but verify” culture). Encourage engineers to use AI tools to accelerate discovery/POCs, troubleshoot incidents, and reduce toil, while ensuring maintainable, secure, well-tested outputs.
What you bring:
7–10+ years in software engineering delivering customer-facing platforms; eCommerce experience strongly preferred (checkout, payments, promotions, identity, order flows). 2+ years leading engineering teams (people leadership and/or tech lead), including coaching, feedback, performance management, and hiring. Proven ability to drive execution: translating product goals into technical plans, managing trade-offs, and delivering high-quality software on schedule. Strong technical foundation in system design, architecture, and modern engineering practices (testing strategy, CI/CD, observability, performance, security). Experience running or partnering on operational excellence: incident response, postmortems, monitoring/alerting, and continuous reliability improvements. Hands-on familiarity with cloud platforms (GCP or AWS) and modern deployment patterns (containers, Kubernetes, service-oriented architectures). Strong data-layer fundamentals across relational databases/SQL and NoSQL/document databases. Working knowledge of relevant technologies in our ecosystem (e.g., Java/Spring Boot, JavaScript/React, Node.js) sufficient to guide design and review technical decisions. AI-enabled engineering: demonstrated experience leveraging AI tools (e.g., coding assistants, test generation, incident triage, documentation) to improve delivery speed and quality, with an emphasis on safe use (security/privacy), strong review standards, and measurable impact. Full professional proficiency in English.
What’s in it for you?
Joining Backcountry isn’t just about having a seat at the table—it’s about helping redesign the table entirely. You’ll be challenged, stretched, and supported as you grow faster than you thought possible. In addition to competitive compensation, we offer: Executive Access: Work directly with brand CEOs and senior leadership, solving real business problems and earning mentorship from top operators. AI-First Skill Building: Get hands-on with the most advanced AI tools in the market. From automation to prompt engineering, you’ll build a modern tech stack that sets you apart in any industry. Accelerated Career Path: High performers are quickly entrusted with greater responsibility, new challenges, and leadership opportunities across our portfolio of brands. Competitive benefits: Paid time off policies, 401(k)/RRSP match, medical/dental/vision and a variety of supplemental policies, and employee discounts at our portfolio companies
Our interview process:
📞 Step 1: If you align with our vision and meet the qualifications, we’ll reach out to schedule a conversation and introduce Backcountry. 🧠 Step 2: You’ll complete a short AI or product-building challenge so we can understand how you approach problems and execution. 💬 Step 3: Participate in deep-dive interviews with Backcountry leadership focused on your experience, product mindset, and operational thinking. 📩 Step 4: Offer. We’ll move fast for the right candidate.