Staff Software Developer

Drive Transformation in Higher Education Technology

Join Acuity Insights in our transformation into a high-growth scaleup as a Staff Software Developer and step into a lead role in reimagining the future of education program management.

Now is a pivotal moment in our company’s journey, and you’ll help scale products, evolve our technology, and expand our impact across medical and health professions education.

This fully remote job lets you work from anywhere in Canada while you help architect and modernize our flagship education management product, One45. One45 is used by hundreds of medical and health professions programs to train and graduate the world’s future healthcare professionals. You will help ensure it scales with our vision and the evolving needs of educators and learners.

It is a high-impact and high-visibility opportunity for a systems-oriented, hands-on technical leader who thrives on navigating complexity, modernizing legacy systems, and making thoughtful architectural decisions that drive long-term success.

The opportunity could be ideal if you’re looking to escape hustle culture and join a people-first company that values work-life balance, invests in your growth, and builds technology with meaningful social impact.

Your Role & Impact

As a Staff Software Developer, you’ll lead the architectural transformation of One45, a mature, mission-critical product serving medical and health professions education programs. With a growing user base and evolving market needs, it is a critical time to reimagine how the system is built.

You’ll play a key role in a multi-year transformation project, and with no playbook in place, you’ll help write it. 

This is a hands-on role where you’ll lead by example, designing and implementing scalable, modular systems, mentoring team members, and shaping a culture of technical excellence through forward-thinking, sustainable development practices.

In this senior-level engineering role, you’ll have architectural ownership on the One45 team and technical influence across Acuity Insights’ products. You’ll report to Sarah Holowenko, Development Manager, and collaborate with other Staff Developers and technology and product leaders at all levels across Acuity Insights.

What You’ll Do

In this role, you can expect to spend roughly half your time hands-on in the code, with the rest dedicated to architectural design, technical communication, documentation, mentorship, and cross-functional collaboration.

You’ll be working with a legacy system built on a PHP (Symfony) backend running on EC2, with MySQL on RDS for data storage, a React-based front end, and infrastructure powered by AWS.

You will:

• Break apart a long-standing monolith into modular, service-oriented components.
• Collaborate with product leaders throughout the development lifecycle to build shared understanding, translating product objectives into clear, actionable plans through domain modelling and other techniques.
• Write architectural documentation that is clear, concise, well-structured, audience-aware, decision-focused, visually supported, and actionable, centralizing understanding and reducing onboarding time.
• Coach and mentor developers at all levels to establish best practices and habits for delivering a fast-changing product.
• Guide decisions around technical debt, tooling, frameworks, and infrastructure with a focus on scalability and long-term impact.
• Collaborate closely with product managers and engineers to shape feasible, high-impact roadmaps that align with platform and enterprise strategy, proactively considering upstream and downstream impacts such as performance, quality, and migration compatibility.
• Contribute directly to code across the stack, from UI to APIs to infrastructure.

Business Outcomes You’ll Enable

In this technical leadership role, your work will be critical in driving strategic progress across engineering, product, and the learner experience. 

Your work will deliver:

• Improved versions of existing features built on your new simplified system design that support faster iteration and greater scaling with lower cost and risk
• Integrated data solutions that connect One45 with other Acuity systems to enable new products and services
• Reduced support costs by leading the team to ship fewer bugs, better self-serve features, and fewer and less impactful incidents
• Improved developer metrics, including faster value delivery (shorter lead time for changes), greater system reliability (lower change failure rate), and more efficient operations (faster incident recovery).

Collaboration & Influence

You’ll work closely with developers, product managers, and other cross-functional collaborators, bringing not just technical expertise, but also presence, empathy, and a sense of shared ownership.

You’ll play a key role in shaping how the team thinks about building One45, not just maintaining what exists but evolving it with fresh ideas and simpler, future-ready approaches. With care and thoughtfulness, you’ll help guide the transition from a maintenance mindset to a growth mindset, inspiring confidence, modelling what’s possible, and offering clear, actionable guidance.

Your way of collaborating and influencing will enable:

• Stronger alignment and shared ownership, built on trust and shared context across functions.
• Intentional, future-facing technical decisions, through clear thinking and meaningful cross-functional dialogue.
• Faster, clearer communication through open idea sharing and constructive feedback.
• Momentum in ambiguity, as you help shape direction and make progress through iteration.
• Tangible architectural progress, driven by vision and delivered through code.
• A stronger, more confident team, uplifted by your guidance and example.
• Greater platform impact, by advocating for One45 in company-wide strategy and architecture conversations.

Experience & Skills You Bring

Architecture Leadership & Modernization Experience. You have led or played a key role in modernizing legacy systems, ideally through incremental, modular approaches rather than full rewrites. You understand how to balance long-term technical vision with real-world constraints and stakeholder needs.

Automated Testing Mindset. You’ve helped foster a culture where automated testing is seen as essential to delivering quality software. You’ve led or contributed meaningfully to establishing best practices, provided hands-on coaching, and influenced teams to treat testing as a core part of the development process, not an afterthought. You understand the challenges of introducing automated testing in legacy systems and know how to apply the right mix of testing approaches to make it work.

Full-Stack Development Proficiency. You’re comfortable working across the stack, from backend services to front-end UIs to database schemas and deployment pipelines. You are familiar with modern frameworks and architectures.

Cloud Infrastructure Experience. You have experience working with cloud-based environments. You know how to design for scalability, reliability, and maintainability.

Mentorship & Team Development. You’re a natural mentor who enjoys levelling up developers at all levels. You lead by example in code quality, architecture thinking, and collaboration. You understand how to support others without taking over.

Cross-Functional Collaboration. You’ve worked closely with Product Managers and other stakeholders to shape solutions that are both technically sound and aligned with user needs. You’re comfortable discussing trade-offs and navigating ambiguity to move projects forward.

Systems Thinking & Pragmatism. You approach problems with a strategic mindset and can connect architectural decisions to business and product goals. At the same time, you know when to ship, when to iterate, and when to simplify.

Clear & Empathetic Communication. You’re a strong communicator, whether you’re writing a Slack post, reviewing a pull request, or whiteboarding a solution. You help others understand your thinking and invite feedback to get to better outcomes together.

Resilient, Curious & Growth-Oriented. You thrive in complex environments and don’t get stuck when things are messy. You’re curious, eager to learn, and resilient when facing challenges, bringing others along with your calm, thoughtful presence.

How We Support You

Compensation & Growth

• Fair and transparent salary. The target annual salary for this role is $170,000 to $185,000 CAD, determined by experience, expected contributions, market alignment and internal equity.  
• Investment in your future. Access employee stock options and share in long-term value creation.
• Expanding your skills. Use a $3,000 annual learning budget for professional and personal development.

Flexibility & Well-Being

• Work your way. Enjoy fully remote work within Canada, plus up to 6 weeks of international work per year.
• Take meaningful breaks. Benefit from a two-week company-wide closure at year-end, self-directed vacation (most take 4-6 weeks per year), and an extra Friday off monthly from February to November.
• Support your health. Access comprehensive benefits for you and your family from day one through Equitable Life of Canada and Nivati.
• Plan for retirement. Join our GRSP matching program with contributions matched up to 2% of your salary.

Family & Community

• Parental leave. Receive a 16-week top-up beyond EI benefits, regardless of your role in expanding your family.
• Leaders and culture that prioritize people. Work in a caring, inclusive environment that values and encourages work-life balance and continuous learning.  

Selection & Interview Process

Whether you apply directly, are referred, or connect with a recruiter or hiring manager, you’ll receive equal consideration.

We carefully review every application, considering your experience, abilities, and motivation, along with the human qualities we value most and that help people thrive here: caring, curiosity, drive, resourcefulness, and resiliency. 

We do not use AI to review your application, but you may be automatically screened out if you do not meet baseline requirements, such as country residency and valid work authorization.

To ensure accuracy and fairness, AI is used for automatic note-taking during some of our live conversations, but all evaluations and decisions are made by real people.

Our process is a two-way conversation. We want to learn about and understand your career, abilities, and interests and make sure you have all the information you need to decide if this opportunity is right for you.

Here are steps to expect:

1. Application Review & Response. A human reviews your application for potential and fit. No matter the outcome, you’ll receive an update via email. 
2. Conversations with Our Recruitment Partner (gdR). Have an introductory video conversation to assess for high-level alignment, while also learning more about the opportunity (e.g., company, products, tech, culture, team, and compensation).
3. Asynchronous Code Review. A brief take-home project that offers you the opportunity to showcase your ability to give feedback and mentor other team members. 
4. Meet the Manager. Spend 45 minutes on a video call with your potential future manager. Discuss your relevant technical work experiences and learn in-depth about the day-to-day of the team and role. 
5. Meet the Team & Showcase Your Technical Abilities. Meet with 3 more team members, a blend of technical and non-technical people, leaders, future peers and collaborators. You’ll meet 1-1 in a remote setting, go through live coding and system design exercises, and learn more about life at Acuity Insights. 
6. Wait For a Decision. The Hiring Manager consolidates and evaluates feedback from the team to make a hiring decision. This typically takes 2-4 days.
7. Offer & Reference Check. If we find a mutual match, we'll invite you to an offer conversation. The offer is contingent on completing a reference check. 

The Future We’re Building

At Acuity Insights, we believe everyone has incredible potential, and our mission is to help uncover and nurture it.

Imagine a world powered by everyone’s full potential. We’re working to create that future by building tools and insights that support holistic success for students, educators, and institutions around the world.

Our journey began with a bold idea: to improve how we assess people, not just by academic metrics, but by who they are. In partnership with McMaster University, we developed Casper in 2004 to measure the durable, human skills that matter in health professions and beyond. That vision came to life with the founding of Altus Assessments in 2014.

Meanwhile, One45 started in 1998 at the University of British Columbia helping medical education programs digitize complex processes like curriculum management, scheduling, and assessment. Over time, it became a trusted partner to programs across North America and beyond.

In 2021, Altus Assessments acquired One45, and in 2022, we unified as Acuity Insights, a single, growing organization with a shared purpose and broader vision.

What started as two distinct products is now one integrated mission supported by our Analytics platform, which delivers actionable insights to drive continuous improvement across the learner journey.

Today, our solutions support students and institutions from admissions to graduation across North America, the U.K., Australia, and Saudi Arabia. 

As we continue to grow, we’re committed to being more than a software provider. We’re trusted thought leaders and valued advisors in higher education, offering practical solutions, strategic insights, and guidance that help our partners make confident, informed decisions.

Life at Acuity Insights

At Acuity Insights, you’ll be part of a team of 130+ professionals. While we primarily collaborate virtually, we foster strong social connections and opportunities for in-person co-working.

Our core values - caring, curious, and driven - define how we work. We listen actively, collaborate openly, and act with integrity. We embrace challenges with creativity, resilience, and a shared commitment to continuous improvement. Above all, we believe in purposeful work that makes a real difference.

We are deeply committed to inclusion and belonging. We respect and value diverse perspectives and recognize that different experiences drive innovation and success. 

Our workplace policies are designed to promote equity, flexibility, and well-being.

We encourage applicants from all backgrounds, especially those from underrepresented groups, to apply.

Thanks for considering Acuity Insights as your next employer!