Staff Software Engineer (Calgary)

Do you want to empower organizations to build smarter compensation strategies while ensuring fair pay for all employees?

Syndio is the leading pay governance and compensation intelligence platform. We help organizations make better pay decisions at every stage of the compensation lifecycle, from leveling and offers to promotions and merit. Our platform gives HR, compensation, and finance leaders the data and decision support they need to govern pay fairly, compliantly, and with confidence. We partner with many of the world’s most recognized and respected enterprises, helping them implement leading-edge compensation solutions with expert guidance and analyzing pay for over 10 million employees across the world.

Join us in our mission to help companies make smarter pay decisions they can trust!

About the role

This is a broad Staff engineering seat reporting directly to the Director of Engineering. You'll work on the problems that cut across the org: building outward-facing surfaces for our platform, building internal tools and agentic solutions that empower teams across the company, and flexing into whichever team needs senior capacity at the time. The common thread is technical depth applied where it has the most leverage, with very little direction required to get there.

The largest current thrust is our third-party ecosystem: integration apps hosted inside major HRIS and enterprise service management platforms, and the APIs that external systems and developers build against. Alongside that, you'll own internal tooling and agentic projects that support teams across the company - building on the AI capabilities our AI team provides. You'll also support teams outside your own, including work on our identity and authentication services, where we want more depth on the team. Independent of that, you need to understand authentication and authorization deeply: every integration you build lives or dies on how identity, permissions, and tenancy map between our platform and someone else's. We use Auth0.

This is a Staff role, and it carries the scope and expectations that implies. You'll gather requirements directly from senior leaders across the company and at times execute without a product manager in the loop. Success is measured three ways: how much of our customers' work can happen inside the systems they already use, how well the tooling you build supports the teams that depend on it, and how reliably you move the needle on whichever problem you're pointed at.

Why this job is exciting

Third-Party Platform Apps & Integrations

• Build and ship integration apps hosted inside third-party platforms - major HRIS, enterprise service management, and the other systems where compensation and HR work actually happens.
• Own the full lifecycle: platform SDKs and app frameworks, tenancy and installation models, marketplace certification and review, versioning, and upgrades that don't break live customer installs.

Agentic Internal Tooling & Projects

• Build internal tooling and agentic projects that support the org - scaffolding, verification, agents that handle work people currently do by hand, and the harnesses that make any of it trustworthy. The users aren't only engineers; teams across the company need tooling too.
• Identify internal workflows an agent can carry end to end, and build the tooling, guardrails, and verification around them that make the output something we can stand behind.
• Continuously sharpen your own agentic development workflow, and turn what works into practices the rest of the team adopts.

Scalable APIs for External Consumers

• Design and build APIs consumed by third-party systems and external developers - with real thought given to versioning, backward compatibility, rate limiting, pagination, idempotency, webhooks, and error semantics that a stranger can debug.
• Own the developer experience of those APIs: documentation, examples, SDKs, and sandbox paths that let an integrator succeed without a support ticket.

Identity & Access - Supporting the Platform

• Pick up work on our identity and authentication services when the team needs capacity, partnering closely with the engineers and architects who set direction there.
• Bring auth depth to everything you design: OAuth 2.0, OIDC, SAML, token exchange, machine-to-machine credentials, service accounts, and scoped access across tenant boundaries.
• Treat this as security-critical work. The data behind our platform is sensitive, and the access controls around it have to be defensible under scrutiny.

Cross-Team Capacity

• Engineers here work across team boundaries. You'll be deployed where the need is highest, ramp quickly in unfamiliar code, and leave it better than you found it.
• Prototype and evaluate unfamiliar technologies and surfaces, then make a clear recommendation - what we should adopt, what we should avoid, and why.
• Partner with technical leaders across the org to set standards - testing, API design, security review, agentic workflow.

Requirements, Not Just Tickets

• Sit with senior leaders - engineering, product, GTM, customer-facing teams - and turn a business need into a scoped, sequenced technical plan.
• At times operate without dedicated product support: gather the requirements, make the call, write it down, and ship it.
• Translate the technical reality back to non-technical stakeholders in terms they can act on - what's possible, what it costs, what we're trading away.

About you

• Staff-level engineer.  A high-output individual contributor who raises the output of everyone around you.
• Deep experience in complex, distributed, service-based systems - you're comfortable reasoning about failure modes, data consistency, and latency across service boundaries.
• Strong across our stack. Python, Go, Node/JavaScript, TypeScript, React, Postgres, and NoSQL stores such as Firebase. You don't need all of them on day one, but you should be genuinely strong in several and unafraid of the rest. Familiarity with caching layers like Redis and the tradeoffs they bring.
• Comfortable moving between problem domains. You can pick up an unfamiliar codebase or an unfamiliar corner of the business and be useful quickly.
• You genuinely like experimenting with new technology. A lot of this role is working with platforms, SDKs, and surfaces nobody here has used before. You should enjoy picking up something unfamiliar, building a rough prototype to learn its shape, and being honest about when it isn't the right answer - curiosity paired with the judgment to know when to stop.
• Serious integration experience. You've built against third-party platforms before and know what that actually costs - quirky APIs, undocumented behavior, certification processes, and partners who ship breaking changes on their schedule.
• API design for outside consumers. You've built APIs that developers outside your company depended on, and you understand the discipline that requires.
• Authentication and authorization fluency. OAuth 2.0 / OIDC / SAML, token lifecycles, multi-tenant authorization models, and the ability to explain a trust boundary on a whiteboard. 
• Testing as a first-class skill. Strong end-to-end and integration testing of service-based architectures, with hands-on experience in an e2e framework (Playwright, Cypress, or similar) and a point of view on how to test systems where the interesting bugs live between the services.
• A strong agentic development practice. You use coding agents daily, you tune how you use them, and you build the harnesses that make them reliable - tight test loops, strong CI/CD gates, spec-to-code workflows, and ways of working that produce high-quality output rather than plausible-looking output.
• High autonomy. You can be handed an ambiguous problem and a senior stakeholder and be trusted to come back with something real.
• Cross-team collaboration. You work well across teams and with non-technical leaders, and you can translate technical constraints into business language.

Nice to have

• Product management instincts: scoping, prioritization, writing requirements, saying no well.
• Prior experience publishing an app to a major enterprise marketplace or app store - HRIS, enterprise service management, CRM, or collaboration platforms.
• Direct experience with Auth0 or comparable identity providers.
• Hands-on experience building with AI systems - LLM applications, agent frameworks, retrieval, or evaluation harnesses.
• Experience in a domain where correctness is non-negotiable and a wrong number carries real consequences.
• Partner- or developer-facing experience - supporting external integrators, running a partner program, or writing API documentation people actually liked.

Why you'll love it here

• Competitive Compensation. For this role our salary is targeted at $180,000 -$200,000 CAD per year. Final offer amounts are determined by factors such as experience and expertise.
•   Syndio Equity. So you can share in Syndio’s success.
• 20 days annually. We encourage our team to recharge when they need to, plus paid sick & safe time, and compassion leave.
• Paid parental leave
•   Medical, Dental, Vision. Syndio pays 90% of employee premiums, and 50% for dependents.
•   Additional Private Medical coverage
• RSSP Plan. To help you save for your future
• Remote-First (within commuting distance of Calgary) #LI-Remote 

The interview overview

Below you'll find an outline of the interview plan for our Staff Software Engineer position. Please note that this is what we expect the process to look like; we may ask you for supplemental information or require an additional step before making a final decision.

• 30 min interview with a member of our Talent Team
• 45 minute zoom interview with the Hiring Manager
• A take-home assignment (This replaces live coding in further interviews)
• Three video interviews with several team members - 2.5 hours
• Final interviews with executive - 30 minutes

At Syndio, we're building a diverse team that values candor, curiosity, and community. If you share these values and are interested in joining us, we'd love to talk with you even if you don't 100% meet the "about you" listed here. We don't expect anyone to have all the answers, as long as you're willing to learn and grow with us.

Syndio is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We are building an inclusive and collaborative workplace as we grow, and we welcome team members regardless of gender/identity, sexual orientation, race or cultural background, religion, physical disability and age.