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Salary: CAD 299,300 - 372,600 / annual
Babylist is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to own significant technical domains and shape the company's product direction. In this role, you'll work on some of the hardest problems across Babylist's expanding platform—from the core registry and shopping experience to new financial products for families, maternal health, and parental education.
As a Staff Engineer, you set technical direction for a domain (a product surface, platform area, or cross-team capability) and sequence the bets that get there over the next 1–2 years. You remain hands-on in the code, especially for genuinely hard problems, while AI agents handle volume work. Your influence extends across multiple teams through the systems and patterns you build, without requiring direct reports.
Key responsibilities include:
- Taking fuzzy business problems from conception through production and owning customer impact
- Building platform or tooling that other teams adopt and depend on
- Making architecture decisions that span teams and are expensive to reverse
- Setting standards for how your domain integrates AI; designing eval harnesses and patterns that ensure agent output is reliable
- Partnering with product, design, and data as a peer from problem framing onward
- Coaching senior engineers through technical and ambiguous decisions
Current focus areas include: unifying customer identity across registry, shop, and health products; designing knowledge systems for reliable AI coding agents; and building Early Investor, a new family finance product, on a fixed deadline.
You've shipped production systems for years and hold strong opinions loosely. You can pick up ambiguous problems and move before the full picture is clear. You've already influenced how a team builds with AI, and the new approach stuck. Staff engineers here lean one of two ways—depth in platform/reliability/AI scaffolding, or depth in customer problems and end-to-end journeys—and both succeed. You don't need to excel at both, but you must be excellent at one and fluent in the other.
Babylist's architecture is intentionally simple: one Rails monolith, MySQL, and few moving parts. This lets the team move fast and lets AI reason about the whole system, so the hardest problems are the ones in front of customers. The tech stack includes Rails, React, TypeScript, Sidekiq, iOS (Swift), Android (Kotlin), MySQL, Snowflake, dbt, Airflow, Weaviate, and deep learning tools.
