{"id":3696067,"url":"https://alion.io/job/movable-ink-lead-backend-developer-distributed-systems-remote","title":"Lead Backend Developer, Distributed Systems (Remote)","company":{"id":174544,"name":"Movable Ink","domain":"movableink.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/movable-ink","size_band":"51-200","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Greenhouse","truth_index":{"grade":"B","score":83,"open_postings":8,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0.5,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":76,"computed_at":"2026-11-07T05:47:08Z"}},"role":"Backend","role_family":"Backend","seniority":"lead","employment_type":null,"work_mode":"remote","remote_scope":"stated_countries","remote_scope_basis":"board_field","remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Toronto, Canada"],"countries":["CA"],"hiring_countries":["CA"],"hiring_countries_total":1,"salary":{"min":147300,"max":192000,"currency":"CAD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":137197},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":7,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"Akka","optional":false},{"name":"Apache Kafka","optional":false},{"name":"CI/CD","optional":false},{"name":"Clojure","optional":false},{"name":"Elixir","optional":false},{"name":"Erlang","optional":false},{"name":"GCP","optional":false},{"name":"Go","optional":false},{"name":"gRPC","optional":false},{"name":"Kubernetes","optional":false},{"name":"Machine Learning","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"Scala","optional":false},{"name":"Dagster","optional":true},{"name":"Prefect","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-11-03T17:56:21Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-11-03","last_verified_at":"2026-11-07T11:40:44Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":3,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":3},"description":"Movable Ink scales content personalization for marketers through data-activated content generation and AI decisioning. The world’s most innovative brands rely on Movable Ink to maximize revenue, simplify workflow and boost marketing agility. Headquartered in New York City with close to 600 employees, Movable Ink serves its global client base with operations throughout North America, Central America, Europe, Australia, and Japan.\nMovable Ink is standing up a new Orchestration team to build the next-generation AI decisioning layer that coordinates every message a brand sends across email, mobile, and other channels. We are looking for a Lead Engineer to set the technical direction for this platform, partner closely with the team's Engineering Manager and senior technical stakeholders to shape its architecture, and lead the hands-on design and implementation of the system from prototype to production. This is a deeply technical, high-ownership role at the intersection of distributed systems and machine learning, with high executive visibility and the opportunity to shape one of the most strategic engineering investments at the company.\nThis role will be reporting to the Engineering Manager of the Orchestration team.\nResponsibilities:\nSet the Technical Direction: lead the architecture, design, and critical implementation decisions that take the orchestration platform from prototype to production\nBuild the Platform: design and build a scalable, event-driven, fault-tolerant distributed system that processes high-volume real-time messaging decisions across workflows and channels\nOwn Key System Components End-to-End: from architecture and implementation through deployment, monitoring, and incident response\nDrive Hard Technical Decisions: conduct design reviews, resolve architectural tradeoffs, and hold the team to high standards for system design, code quality, testing, and operational rigor\nPartner Across the Platform: collaborate closely with Product, Machine Learning, Data Platform, and adjacent engineering teams to translate complex requirements into clear technical designs with realistic paths to production\nDrive Operational Excellence: ensure the platform operates reliably at scale through strong observability, metrics, incident response practices, and shared on-call responsibilities for business-critical services\nMentor and Model: serve as the senior technical voice on the team, mentoring engineers and modeling strong engineering practices\nQualifications:\n7+ years of software engineering experience with a focus on distributed systems\nDeep experience designing, building, and operating large-scale distributed systems that are fault tolerant, highly available, and highly concurrent\nStrong systems thinking, with sound architectural judgment around event-driven, stateful, real-time decisioning systems\nSkill at building complex systems: identifying core primitives, making sound architectural choices under uncertainty, and adapting designs as requirements evolve\nExperience building and operating backend services in a modern cloud environment (we use Google Cloud Platform), including proficiency with container orchestration (we use Kubernetes)\nHands-on experience with microservice and service-oriented architectures, including the inter-service communication patterns that compose them - synchronous, event-sourced, orchestrated, and asynchronous (we use gRPC and Kafka)\nStrong foundation in Python\nExperience with Elixir - which we use for building concurrent, fault-tolerant services - is a strong plus. Experience with Erlang, Scala/Akka, Go, or Clojure also transfers well\nPractical experience evaluating and designing for distributed systems fundamentals: consensus, partitioning, replication, back-pressure, idempotency, and failure handling\nExemplary software engineering practices (system design, code review, testing, CI/CD)\nStrong focus on operational excellence, including observability, incident response, and healthy on-call practices\nStrong technical leadership skills, with the ability to drive architectural decisions, lead design reviews, and mentor other engineers\nExceptional problem-solving skills, including the ability to efficiently identify, analyze, and resolve complex issues in production systems\nClear communicator who can translate technical tradeoffs into practical decisions with product and engineering stakeholders\n(Nice to have) Experience with workflow orchestration systems (e.g. Prefect, Airflow, Dagster, Temporal)\n(Nice to have) Experience building, operating, or integrating with ML-driven decisioning or scoring systems\nThe base pay range for this position is $147,300 - $192,000 CAD/year, which can include additional bonus depending on the position ultimately offered, in addition to a full range of medical, financial, and/or other benefits. The base pay offered may vary depending on job-related knowledge, skills, and experience.\nStudies have shown that women, communities of color, and historically underrepresented people are less likely to apply to jobs unless they meet every single qualification. We are committed to building a diverse and inclusive culture where all Inkers can thrive. If you’re excited about the role but don’t meet all of the abovementioned qualifications, we encourage you to apply. Our differences bring a breadth of knowledge and perspectives that makes us collectively stronger.\nWe welcome and employ people regardless of race, color, gender identity or expression, religion, genetic information, parental or pregnancy status, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, ethnicity, family or marital status, physical and mental ability, political affiliation, disability, Veteran status, or other protected characteristics. We are proud to be an equal opportunity employer.","description_format":"text","description_chars":5825,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":7,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":[],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"Canada","iso":"CA","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Marketing Automation","Email Marketing"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-11-03T18:07:20Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":90,"band":"hot","label":"Hiring now","p_open":1,"p_active":0.903,"p_room":1,"age_days":3,"expected_fill_days":76,"reasons":["conf:1","velocity","win:early"],"computed_at":"2026-11-07T05:47:08Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":137197,"is_top_pay":false},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/movable-ink-lead-backend-developer-distributed-systems-remote","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/movable-ink-lead-backend-developer-distributed-systems-remote.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-11-07T12:54:37Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":14971,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-11-08T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":174544},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=174544"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fmovable-ink-lead-backend-developer-distributed-systems-remote"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fmovable-ink-lead-backend-developer-distributed-systems-remote"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fmovable-ink-lead-backend-developer-distributed-systems-remote"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/movable-ink-lead-backend-developer-distributed-systems-remote\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fmovable-ink-lead-backend-developer-distributed-systems-remote"}],"agent":{"mcp":"https://alion.io/mcp/jobs","mcp_open":"https://alion.io/mcp/open","next":[{"tool":"get_job","arguments":{"id":3696067}},{"tool":"search_jobs","arguments":{"company":"movableink.com","detail":"compact"}},{"tool":"match_people","arguments":{"job_id":3696067},"note":"people open to offers who fit this vacancy"}],"note":"The same data through MCP tools: https://alion.io/mcp/open needs no sign-in (compact searches, postings, people); https://alion.io/mcp with an Alion account has everything. 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