Senior Software Engineer, Infrastructure
Department:
Job Summary
We are hiring a Senior Software Engineer to help rebuild the platform underneath Stream. Over the next year the infrastructure team is moving from AWS to GCP moving onto Kubernetes and relocating 35 to 40 Postgres shards off managed RDS to self-hosted while the platform keeps serving billions of API requests a month. You will own parts of that outright.
This is a small senior team without the support structures of a large organisation. You will write code most of the time and make infrastructure calls on your own. Success looks like systems that scale predictably under load cloud spend that falls per unit of traffic and migrations that land without incident.
This is a full-time job opening based in Toronto (3 days hybrid).
Stream powers real-time Chat Video Activity Feeds and AI Moderation for billions of end-users across thousands of apps from Strava and Bumble to eBay and Patreon. Our platform processes billions of API requests per month and supports applications with millions of concurrent users while delivering highly reliable low-latency services and a great developer experience.
Design build and operate infrastructure for real-time systems carrying millions of concurrent connections and billions of monthly API requests.
Drive Kubernetes end to end: cluster architecture workload design and the migration of existing services. You will be designing clusters not operating someone elses.
Re-architect workloads as part of the AWS to GCP migration for cost and performance rather than a lift and shift.
Own cloud cost and efficiency work: find the levers measure them against real spend and utilisation data and show what moved.
Write production Go and Python: internal services platform tooling and automation that change how product and SDK engineers deploy observe and debug.
Lead post-migration tuning and capacity planning closing the loop between the architecture you chose and what production actually does.
Work with backend video and moderation engineers on system design reliability targets and tradeoffs that cross service boundaries.
Take part in on-call incident response and root cause analysis and turn what you find into durable fixes.
5 years in infrastructure platform DevOps or SRE engineering with clear depth in infrastructure over application development.
A software engineering background. You have built systems not only configured them. Production coding experience in Go or Python. Scripting-only backgrounds are not a fit.
Kubernetes at meaningful production scale past operations: you have driven cluster strategy designed workloads or led a migration and you have tuned what came out the other side for cost and efficiency.
Cloud cost or efficiency optimisation you personally led on AWS or GCP with an outcome you can put a number on. FinOps practice is a plus.
Direct experience running high-scale high-load production systems.
Strong cloud fundamentals across networking compute storage and IAM and the habit of asking why a system behaves the way it does instead of accepting the default.
Comfortable in a small team: leading a project and reviewing a PR in the same week.
AI tooling already in your engineering workflow. Applied use not familiarity.
Both AWS and GCP and migration experience between providers.
PostgreSQL at scale: sharding replication strategy partitioning tradeoffs ideally self-hosted.
Real-time systems: WebSockets WebRTC streaming or other persistent-connection workloads.
The wider stack: CockroachDB Redis Terraform and a Prometheus-based observability stack.
An API-first or infrastructure company at scaleup stage.
Open source contributions to infrastructure or platform tooling.
Writing or talks on cloud platform or distributed systems.
Formal FinOps practice or owning cloud commitment and reservation strategy.
Work on developer-facing API or SDK products.
Go gRPC RocksDB Python
PostgreSQL RabbitMQ
GCP
Grafana Prometheus ELK (Elasticsearch and Kibana)
Jaeger and Tempo for distributed tracing Datadog
Redis Memcached
Claude Code Cursor
You want infrastructure problems at a scale most engineers never touch and the autonomy to own them.
You ship fast and learn fast including when it is hectic.
You are self-directed and comfortable working with a globally distributed team across time zones.
You want tightly scoped tickets and step-by-step direction.
You need a calm highly predictable environment.
You would rather wait for a defined process than act.
Stream employees enjoy some of the best job benefits in the industry:
A team of exceptional engineers
The chance to work on OSS projects
20 days of PTO first year of employment 24 days starting your second year
Company equity
Extended Healthcare
Dental benefit
Long & Short-Term Disability
Life Insurance
Fitness stipend
A Macbook Pro provided
A Learning and Development budget
The opportunity to attend or present to global conferences and meetups
The possibility to visit our offices in Boulder CO and Amsterdam NL
Salary Range: CA$155000 to CA$200000 per year plus stock options. Final offer within this range depends on experience and interview outcome.
Were a Series B company with global presence and a team of around 145 people from more than 35 countries.
Were backed by Felicis Ventures GGV Capital 01 Advisors Techstars and Arthur Ventures with angels including Dick Costolo (ex-CEO of Twitter) Olivier Pomel (CEO of Datadog) Tom Preston-Werner (co-founder of GitHub) and Nicolas Dessaigne (co-founder of Algolia).
Well be straight with you: a startup is more demanding than a large company. Theres no fixed playbook youll own things end to end and youll sometimes pick up work outside your title. Thats also what makes it a fast place to grow. If you want real ownership and high scale more than structure and a set career ladder youll feel at home here.
Hybrid office policy: applicants based (or relocating to) one of our office locations are expected to work according to the applicable local office attendance policy.
Equal opportunity employer statement: Stream provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race color religion age sex national origin disability status genetics protected veteran status sexual orientation gender identity or expression or any other characteristic protected by federal state or local laws.
This policy applies to all terms and conditions of employment including recruiting hiring placement promotion termination layoff recall transfer leaves of absence compensation and training.
Note for external recruiters: We currently have this role covered and do not accept unsolicited agency resumes. We are not responsible for any fees related to unsolicited resumes.
Required Experience:
Senior IC
About Company
Scalable and fast APIs for building social networks and apps. Activity feeds, chat, and video solutions powered by a global Edge Network.