Staff Software Engineer - Data Systems

Purpose Unlimited is an independent financial services company with an unrelenting focus on customer-centric innovation, delivered through technology-driven solutions. Led by entrepreneur Som Seif, the company is developing a diversified product platform aimed at addressing historically underserved segments of the market. Purpose Unlimited’s businesses include Purpose Investments, Advisor Solutions by Purpose, and Driven. Vacancy Status: This is for a current vacancy Who you are Purpose Unlimited is building the financial products infrastructure that puts clients first, and we need the engineer who ensures that infrastructure is fast, reliable, and built to evolve. This is the Staff Engineer seat where product quality, engineering culture, and AI-era craft converge. You own the hardest technical problems in our consumer-facing product. You set the standard for how code ships, how architecture decisions get made, and how AI-augmented engineering actually works in a regulated environment. Your impact is measured in product outcomes - performance, reliability, client experience - not in lines of code or meetings attended. We treat AI fluency as a baseline expectation, not a nice-to-have. You will lead how this team integrates AI into its engineering workflows, from AI-assisted development to governing AI-generated code in production. The routine work is increasingly handled by AI; your job is the judgment, architecture, and craft that AI cannot replace. We use Object Process Modeling (OPM) for system mapping and Figures-of-merit (FOMs) as the measurement layer. You don’t need to be a process mapping expert, but you do need to think in systems, understanding how technical decisions ripple through product quality and the end-user experience. In this role, you will Design and build the core data systems that power our products, internal platforms, and AI-enabled applications.Define durable data models, APIs, events, contracts, and system boundaries.Build shared primitives for reliable data access, search, retrieval, synchronization, and observability.Make architectural choices across databases, streaming, caching, indexing, storage, and distributed systems.Design for correctness under failure: concurrency, idempotency, ordering, consistency, retries, migrations, and recovery.Build data foundations that make company knowledge safely and efficiently usable by both software and AI systems.Simplify complex systems and create abstractions that make other engineers faster. You might thrive here if you Have exceptional computer science fundamentals, particularly in databases, distributed systems, algorithms, and software architecture.Are a strong software engineer first and can own systems from design through production.Understand databases below the abstraction layer: transactions, isolation, indexing, query planning, replication, partitioning, and storage.Can reason clearly about consistency, latency, throughput, durability, concurrency, and failure modes.Have designed systems that cross service boundaries using APIs, events, schemas, and durable contracts.Know how to choose between transactional, analytical, streaming, search, and caching systems based on first principles.Understand the data requirements of modern AI systems, including retrieval, context assembly, permissions, provenance, and reliable access to structured and unstructured data.Have strong taste for simple architectures and know when not to introduce infrastructure.Operate at Staff level by shaping architecture beyond your own code and raising the technical bar around you. You could be an especially great fit if You enjoy difficult problems at the intersection of backend engineering, databases, distributed systems, and emerging AI systems.You have built foundational infrastructure and seen how architectural decisions behave at scale.You naturally think in invariants, access patterns, state transitions, and failure cases.You can move comfortably from high-level architecture to debugging a subtle systems problem.You prefer a few well-designed primitives over layers of frameworks and accidental complexity. Example problems What is the canonical representation of a customer, account, portfolio, or transaction across multiple systems?Where should state live, and which system should be authoritative?How should an important business event propagate reliably through the system?What consistency guarantees does a workflow actually require?How should structured and unstructured company data be exposed safely to applications and AI systems?When should something be computed synchronously, asynchronously, incrementally, or on demand?How do we evolve schemas and interfaces without breaking dependent systems? Our Five Values Innovation – Bring new ideas, challenge the status quo, and experiment without waiting for permission.Courage – Speak up when something isn't working; act with conviction even when it's uncomfortable.Owner's Mindset – Take full accountability for your squad's outcomes.Client Focus – Place client outcomes at the center of every architectural and delivery decision.Winning Through Growth – Invest in your own development and actively contribute to the team's growth. What it’s like here You’ll join a team that ships weekly, reviews each other’s thinking as seriously as each other’s code, and has the autonomy to make real architectural calls. We’re an engineering culture built on Owner’s Mindset - you own the outcome, not just the task. We believe in Winning Through Individual and Collective Growth, which means your development matters as much as your delivery. Why should you join us? We are one of Canada's Top Small & Medium Employers' 2023, 2024, 2025 & 2026.We believe in innovation and a vibrant culture - work for an innovative, people-first, financial services firm that values entrepreneurialism.We believe in a flexible work structure – A flexible hybrid work model that empowers you to do your best work whether at home or the office.We care about your rewards - Competitive compensation including equity program.We care about your health – comprehensive group health and dental benefits and life insurance at little to no cost to you. We also offer a Lifestyle Spending Account for all your wellness needs.We care about your quality of life - flexible paid time-off policy with unlimited vacation days, and flexible sick and mental health days.We care about your family - Paid parental leave for eligible employees with a top-up.We care about your future – Generous Group RRSP matching and an optional TFSA program.We care about your development – We offer training opportunities and tuition support year-round. Purpose Unlimited is an equal employer and we are dedicated to fostering an inclusive and barrier-free work environment for all employees and candidates. We encourage all qualified candidates to apply and if accommodation is required during any stage of the recruitment process, please contact any member of the People & Culture team at PeopleCultureTeam@purpose-unlimited.com. Our work philosophy is a hybrid model allowing for flexibility and collaboration. Applicants must be legally entitled to work in Canada. Immigration sponsorship is not offered for this role. We may use artificial intelligence technology to assist in screening, assessing, or selecting applicants for this position. Final hiring decisions are made by qualified human reviewers. We thank all applicants for their interest; however, only those selected for interviews will be contacted.