Senior/Staff Developer

Staff Developer

Location: Hybrid – In-office 3 days/week in Calgary, Canada

Type: Full-time

Reports to: Chief Technology Officer (CTO)

Company: PaintScout – Estimating Software for Painting Companies

About PaintScout

PaintScout is a fast-growing SaaS company that helps painting contractors streamline their estimating and sales process. Our platform is trusted by painting companies across North America to produce faster, smarter, more accurate quotes — helping them grow their businesses.

As we scale our product, customers, and engineering team, we're investing heavily in building a strong technical foundation. This is a key senior individual contributor role that will have a meaningful impact on the direction, quality, and scalability of our platform.

The Role

We're looking for an experienced Senior/Staff Developer to provide technical leadership across the engineering team and work directly with the CTO on system design, architecture, and long-term technical strategy.

This is not a people-management role. Instead, you'll be a highly influential senior engineer who raises the bar for how we design systems, write code, and make technical decisions. You've built and operated systems at scale, have strong opinions backed by experience, and enjoy collaborating to find the best solution — not just your solution.

You'll spend the majority of your time writing clean, reliable, production-quality code, while also mentoring other engineers, guiding architectural decisions, and helping the team avoid costly technical mistakes as we grow.

If you enjoy solving complex problems, thinking in systems, and making the engineers around you better — this role is for you.

What You'll Do

• Work directly with the CTO on system design, architecture, and technical strategy

Design, build, and evolve scalable systems that support a growing SaaS platform

Lead by example through high-quality, maintainable, well-tested code.

• Provide technical leadership across the engineering team without formal people management.
• Mentor and support developers through code reviews, design discussions, and pairing
• Help engineers make sound technical decisions by offering context, tradeoffs, and experience.
• Identify architectural risks early and propose pragmatic solutions
• Collaborate closely with product and engineering to align technical decisions with business goals
• Influence engineering standards, best practices, and long-term maintainability
• Balance short-term delivery with long-term system health

Applied AI & Emerging Technology

We're looking for someone who stays current with modern engineering trends — including AI — and thinks critically about how new technologies can create real value for the product and the business.

This role isn't about chasing buzzwords. It's about understanding what's possible, what's practical, and when new capabilities are worth investing in.

What This Means in Practice

• Stay up to date with advances in AI, developer tooling, and platform technology
• Thoughtfully evaluate how AI and automation can improve our product, internal tooling, and engineering workflows
• Identify opportunities to apply AI in ways that meaningfully improve customer outcomes, efficiency, or scalability
• Partner with the CTO and product team to explore, prototype, and validate AI-driven ideas
• Help the team make informed decisions about adopting (or deliberately not adopting) new technologies
• Bring a grounded, experience-based perspective to conversations about emerging tools and platforms

How You'll Make an Impact

• Make the engineering team better by improving how decisions are made

Reduce technical risk as the product and team scale

• Increase consistency, reliability, and quality across the codebase
• Help shape the technical culture and expectations of a growing engineering organization

What We're Looking For

• 7+ years of professional experience in backend or full-stack development
• Proven experience building and operating systems at scale
• Strong system design and architecture skills
• Deep understanding of tradeoffs in scalability, performance, reliability, and developer experience
• A track record of writing clean, reliable, production-grade code
• Strong opinions informed by experience — paired with a collaborative, respectful mindset
• Passion for mentoring and helping other developers grow
• Excellent communication skills, especially around technical concepts and decisions
• Comfortable working in a fast-moving startup environment
• High ownership mentality and strong sense of responsibility for system outcomes

Nice to Have

• Experience with our stack or similar technologies:
• Backend: , serverless architectures (AWS Lambda)
• Databases: Cloudant/CouchDB, Elasticsearch or similar data stores
• Frontend: React
• Experience with SaaS or B2B software products
• Experience evolving systems through multiple growth stages
• Background working closely with product teams on technical strategy

Why Join PaintScout?

• Work directly with the CTO on meaningful technical decisions
• Have a major influence on the architecture and future of a growing SaaS platform
• Be a senior technical leader without people-management overhead
• Shape engineering culture, standards, and best practices
• Join a product-focused, collaborative team where quality and pragmatism matter
• Compensation: Based on experience

Job Type: Full-time

Work Location: Hybrid remote in Calgary, AB T2E 3H6