Back to jobs
New

Staff Software Engineer

Canada

What The Role Is

As a Staff Engineer at Babylist, you own some of our hardest domains and decide where they go. Millions of families depend on what we build. Agents write most of the code now. So the hard part is yours: what to build, how it should work and whether what shipped was right. You're still in the code for the genuinely hard problems. Agents handle the volume. You spend your time on the parts that need a person. We're building well beyond the registry now: the financial side of raising a kid, maternal health made simpler and more human, the education new parents are looking for and the community around them. The hard problems run across all of it, plus the platform underneath and the AI we already ship to families.

You'll own a big piece of the product, but you won't be boxed into it. The roadmap is open. You have a say in which bets we make, and you pick what you take on next.

What You'll Own

A Staff Engineer here sets direction. You own a domain: a product surface, a platform area or a capability that cuts across several teams. You set where it's going over the next year or two, sequence the bets that get there and make the technical and product calls along the way. You're still in the code. We don't have architects who've stopped building. If you stepped away, multiple teams would feel it. Your influence shows up in the systems and the work other teams choose to build on. You don't need direct reports to have that reach. It comes from what you build.

In practice, you:

  • Take a fuzzy business problem from the first sketch through to production, and stay on the hook for whether it actually helped customers.
  • Build the platform or tooling other teams adopt by choice, and own it as it scales.
  • Make the architecture calls that span teams and the ones that are expensive to reverse.
  • Set the standard for how your domain builds with AI. Decide what good looks like, build the patterns and evals that get agents there and catch the output that's confidently wrong before it ships.
  • Partner with product, design and data as a peer, shaping what's worth building from the start.
  • Coach Senior engineers through the hard calls, the ambiguous ones as much as the technical ones.

A few problems people at this level are working on right now:

  • Resolving one customer across registry, shop and health, plus the friends and family buying for them, so personalization works everywhere without each team rebuilding it.
  • Designing the knowledge system our coding agents reliably load, and working out how much context actually helps before it starts to hurt.
  • Building Early Investor, our new family finance product, from scratch, on a deadline that can't move.

Who You Are

You've shipped production systems for enough years to have earned strong opinions, and you hold them loosely. You can pick up an ambiguous problem and start moving before anyone hands you the full picture. You've already changed how a team builds with AI, and the new way stuck. Most Staff engineers lean one of two ways, and both do well here. Some point their depth at the systems everyone runs on: the platforms, the reliability and security bar, the harnesses that make AI produce good code. Others point it at the customer: framing the problem with PMs as peers, owning a journey end to end, deciding what to build and learning whether it worked. You don't have to be both. You do have to be excellent at one and fluent in the other.

A few things that tend to be true of people who thrive here:

  • You measure yourself by impact: a customer outcome, or a system a dozen teams come to depend on.
  • You're curious: you spot problems before they're filed and push your own ideas until they ship.

Compensation

We post real numbers. For a Canada-based Staff Engineer, the starting base salary range is $299,300 to $372,600 CAD, plus a target annual bonus of 20 percent of base. That's total target cash of roughly $359,160 to $447,120 CAD. On top of that you get meaningful equity and an RRSP match. Where you start in that range depends on your experience, and your pay grows from there with performance and scope.

How We Build 

AI is the default here. Engineers run agentic sessions for most of the work, and a lot of the interesting engineering now lives in the scaffolding that makes the agents good: the eval harnesses, the curated context, custom review skills and fast CI. Agents also triage incidents and handle a big share of support. A human always owns the outcome.

The architecture is intentionally simple: one Rails monolith, MySQL and few moving parts. That's deliberate. Simple infrastructure lets us move fast and lets AI reason about the whole system, so the hardest problems are the ones in front of customers.

The Stack

  • Core app: Rails, Packwerk, React, TypeScript, Sidekiq
  • Mobile: iOS (Swift), Android (Kotlin)
  • Data, search & events: MySQL, Snowflake, dbt, Airflow, Weaviate, WarpStream, Hex, Sigma
  • Machine learning: deep learning, matrix factorization, retrieval & ranking, AWS SageMaker, MLflow
  • AI & dev tooling: Claude Code, Devin, Linear, CodeRabbit, Warden, LangChain, Bedrock AgentCore, Maxim
  • Infra & ops: AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform, GitHub Actions, Datadog, incident.io, LaunchDarkly
  • Key integrations: Shopify (payments), Iterable (CRM)

Why Babylist

An engineer, expecting her first baby, couldn't find the registry she wanted. So she built it. That's how Babylist started, and it's still how we work: engineers solving problems for families. Becoming a parent is one of the biggest moments in a person's life. Millions reach it for the first time every year, making thousands of decisions and figuring it out as they go. That's who we build for, and we're a long way from done.

Ten million people give gifts through Babylist every year. We did more than $750M in revenue in 2025, up 45 percent over the year before, and we've been profitable for eight years while staying independent. So you can take on a hard, multi-year problem without watching over your shoulder for the next round or the next correction. And the team is small, around 65 engineers, so what you ship stays visible and your scope stays wide.

How We Work

Remote-first across the US and Canada, and we have been for years. That's not changing. We trust you to own your time and your outcomes, and we get everyone in a room together twice a year. Teams are small, pods of three to five engineers, so nothing you ship disappears into a committee. You'll work shoulder to shoulder with product, design and data, and with the partners across the business who rely on what you ship. You'll also stay close to customers yourself: sitting in on user interviews, watching session recordings, riding along with support. Here that's part of the engineering job, on a regular basis.

How We Hire

Three rounds, usually two to three weeks start to finish.

  1. Recruiter conversation (30 minutes). Trade context: what you want next, what we're building and straight answers on comp, team and remote.
  2. Technical screen (1 hour). One round, no AI, language-agnostic. Reach for Google when you normally would. We just want to see how you reason from first principles.
  3. Final round (4 hours). Four one-hour interviews: system design, AI-assisted coding with the tools you'd actually use here, product sense and culture and values. You'll hear back either way within 24 to 48 hours.

If your timeline is tight, tell us and we'll move faster.

Benefits

  • Company-paid medical and fully covered dental and vision
  • A RRSP match
  • Generous paid parental leave for birthing and non-birthing parents, plus a gradual return-to-work program
  • Winter Wonder Week, a paid company-wide week off at the end of the year
  • A remote-work stipend
  • Mental-health and wellness support

A Few Things To Know

  • We record and transcribe interviews to evaluate candidates, in line with applicable privacy laws.
  • We expect you to use AI in your work and we welcome it in the process, but what you submit and say should reflect your own thinking.
  • If you have a family member or close relationship with a Babylist employee, let your recruiter know.
  • Official outreach only ever comes from an @babylist.com address

Create a Job Alert

Interested in building your career at Babylist? Get future opportunities sent straight to your email.

Apply for this job

*

indicates a required field

Resume/CV*

Accepted file types: pdf, doc, docx, txt, rtf

Select...
Select...
Select...
Select...

Voluntary Self-Identification

For government reporting purposes, we ask candidates to respond to the below self-identification survey. Completion of the form is entirely voluntary. Whatever your decision, it will not be considered in the hiring process or thereafter. Any information that you do provide will be recorded and maintained in a confidential file.

As set forth in Babylist’s Equal Employment Opportunity policy, we do not discriminate on the basis of any protected group status under any applicable law.

Select...
Select...
Race & Ethnicity Definitions

If you believe you belong to any of the categories of protected veterans listed below, please indicate by making the appropriate selection. As a government contractor subject to the Vietnam Era Veterans Readjustment Assistance Act (VEVRAA), we request this information in order to measure the effectiveness of the outreach and positive recruitment efforts we undertake pursuant to VEVRAA. Classification of protected categories is as follows:

A "disabled veteran" is one of the following: a veteran of the U.S. military, ground, naval or air service who is entitled to compensation (or who but for the receipt of military retired pay would be entitled to compensation) under laws administered by the Secretary of Veterans Affairs; or a person who was discharged or released from active duty because of a service-connected disability.

A "recently separated veteran" means any veteran during the three-year period beginning on the date of such veteran's discharge or release from active duty in the U.S. military, ground, naval, or air service.

An "active duty wartime or campaign badge veteran" means a veteran who served on active duty in the U.S. military, ground, naval or air service during a war, or in a campaign or expedition for which a campaign badge has been authorized under the laws administered by the Department of Defense.

An "Armed forces service medal veteran" means a veteran who, while serving on active duty in the U.S. military, ground, naval or air service, participated in a United States military operation for which an Armed Forces service medal was awarded pursuant to Executive Order 12985.

Select...

Voluntary Self-Identification of Disability

Form CC-305
Page 1 of 1
OMB Control Number 1250-0005
Expires 04/30/2026

Why are you being asked to complete this form?

We are a federal contractor or subcontractor. The law requires us to provide equal employment opportunity to qualified people with disabilities. We have a goal of having at least 7% of our workers as people with disabilities. The law says we must measure our progress towards this goal. To do this, we must ask applicants and employees if they have a disability or have ever had one. People can become disabled, so we need to ask this question at least every five years.

Completing this form is voluntary, and we hope that you will choose to do so. Your answer is confidential. No one who makes hiring decisions will see it. Your decision to complete the form and your answer will not harm you in any way. If you want to learn more about the law or this form, visit the U.S. Department of Labor’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) website at www.dol.gov/ofccp.

How do you know if you have a disability?

A disability is a condition that substantially limits one or more of your “major life activities.” If you have or have ever had such a condition, you are a person with a disability. Disabilities include, but are not limited to:

  • Alcohol or other substance use disorder (not currently using drugs illegally)
  • Autoimmune disorder, for example, lupus, fibromyalgia, rheumatoid arthritis, HIV/AIDS
  • Blind or low vision
  • Cancer (past or present)
  • Cardiovascular or heart disease
  • Celiac disease
  • Cerebral palsy
  • Deaf or serious difficulty hearing
  • Diabetes
  • Disfigurement, for example, disfigurement caused by burns, wounds, accidents, or congenital disorders
  • Epilepsy or other seizure disorder
  • Gastrointestinal disorders, for example, Crohn's Disease, irritable bowel syndrome
  • Intellectual or developmental disability
  • Mental health conditions, for example, depression, bipolar disorder, anxiety disorder, schizophrenia, PTSD
  • Missing limbs or partially missing limbs
  • Mobility impairment, benefiting from the use of a wheelchair, scooter, walker, leg brace(s) and/or other supports
  • Nervous system condition, for example, migraine headaches, Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis (MS)
  • Neurodivergence, for example, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), autism spectrum disorder, dyslexia, dyspraxia, other learning disabilities
  • Partial or complete paralysis (any cause)
  • Pulmonary or respiratory conditions, for example, tuberculosis, asthma, emphysema
  • Short stature (dwarfism)
  • Traumatic brain injury
Select...

PUBLIC BURDEN STATEMENT: According to the Paperwork Reduction Act of 1995 no persons are required to respond to a collection of information unless such collection displays a valid OMB control number. This survey should take about 5 minutes to complete.