Senior Full-Stack Engineer (Media Team)

Job description

SENIOR FULL-STACK ENGINEER (MEDIA TEAM) Location: Ottawa, ON or Toronto, ON | Hybrid Department: R&D | Video Type: Permanent | Full-Time Vacancy Status: This is an active, approved role and we are currently hiring for this position. ABOUT SOLINK At Solink, our mission is to safeguard what matters most. We provide businesses with the tools to know sooner and act faster by transforming video security into real-time operational insights. Our cloud-based platform integrates seamlessly with your existing cameras and systems, turning them into intelligent sensors that detect and interpret key moments. This empowers teams to make data-driven decisions, enhance security, and improve operational efficiency. Trusted by over 36,000 locations across 60+ countries - including brands like McDonald’s and JYSK - Solink delivers clarity when it counts. Our solutions help businesses reduce shrink, optimize performance, and respond proactively to potential threats. We're growing rapidly, earning industry recognition, and scaling with purpose. We’ve been recognized by Deloitte’s Fast 50™ and Fast 500™, Business Intelligence Group, and as one of Ottawa’s Best Places to Work. And we’re just getting started! THE ROLE As a Senior Full-Stack Engineer on the Media Team, you will be responsible for the cloud services that power Solink's media pipeline: ingesting, processing, storing, and serving media data at scale for over 36,000 customer locations. You'll work deep in AWS-native infrastructure, building services that are cost-efficient, observable, and resilient under real-world load. This role is ideal for a senior backend or full-stack engineer who thinks in terms of throughput, latency, and cost per gigabyte as much as they think in code; someone who is comfortable owning a service from design through production operation, and who treats reliability and resource efficiency as first-class design constraints rather than afterthoughts. WHAT YOU'LL DO - Design, build, and operate backend services that handle media ingestion, processing, storage, and retrieval at scale. - Work extensively with core AWS services (SQS, S3, Lambda, and related managed services) to build event-driven, loosely coupled pipelines. - Leverage AI tools effectively throughout the development lifecycle, from planning, design, implementation to operation, debugging and observability. - Design and evolve media platform APIs and contracts for multiple internal, as well as external consumers with contract and end-to-end tests. - Instrument services with meaningful observability: structured logging, metrics, and traces built on OpenTelemetry concepts, so behaviour in production is understandable regardless of the underlying vendor (Datadog, Grafana, Honeycomb, or otherwise). - Own the full deployment lifecycle for your services: staging and production environments, gradual roll-outs, canary releases, and A/B testing of infrastructure and feature changes. - Continuously monitor and tune and optimize cloud resource usage (networking, storage tiering, and compute/processing), balancing cost, performance, and reliability trade-offs. - Diagnose and resolve complex, cross-service production issues, including intermittent and load-dependent failures in media pipelines. - Partner closely with Product, QA, and cross-functional engineering teams to translate media and storage requirements into pragmatic, production-ready services. - Contribute to architectural decisions for the media platform, including service boundaries, data models, and integration contracts with other teams. - Mentor other engineers through code reviews, design discussions, and informal knowledge sharing. - Continuously improve team tooling, run books, and processes, including thoughtful adoption of AI-assisted workflows where appropriate. WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR MUST-HAVE QUALIFICATIONS - Strong experience as a senior-level backend or backend-leaning full-stack engineer, with a track record of owning production services end-to-end for low-latency massive volume data. - Hands-on cloud and AWS experience, with proficiency in core services such as SQS, EKS, Redis, and CloudFront alongside S3/Lambda and a solid grasp of designing around their operational characteristics and limits. - Strong AI tool usage to increase quality and velocity, and a learning mindset that helps evolve development workflow as AI tooling and capabilities change. - Observability experience, not tied to any specific vendor, but a strong conceptual understanding of OpenTelemetry (traces, metrics, logs) and how to use it to make distributed systems debuggable. - Practical experience with cloud deployment practices: managing staging and production environments, running gradual/canary roll-outs, and conducting A/B tests on infrastructure or service changes. - A resource-aware, optimization-oriented mindset: comfortable fine-tuning cloud networking, storage configuration, and processing pipelines to balance cost, performance, and reliability. - Strong distributed systems fundamentals: asynchronous processing, eventual consistency, idempotency, and failure handling in multi-service pipelines. - Experience with modern backend development, including API design and production reliability practices. - Comfortable diagnosing complex, cross-service, and intermittent production issues independently and under pressure. - Strong problem-solving skills, an ownership mindset, and the ability to influence technical decisions beyond your own code. - Comfortable improving and extending legacy, brownfield services. NICE-TO-HAVE - Experience with media, video, or other high-throughput binary data pipelines and technologies (e.g. WebRTC, HLS, RTSP, ffmpeg). - Experience with Kubernetes and cloud-native operations (observability, metrics/tracing, incident response, SLOs). - Experience with GCP and Azure - Experience with TypeScript and Rust - Experience scaling systems in high-growth or "next-stage" environments. - Interest in applying AI/ML to improve product capabilities and team productivity. SECURITY REQUIREMENTS - Candidates must undergo a criminal records check upon hire; - Be a Canadian Citizen (dual citizens included), or eligible to work in Canada; - Be willing to comply with Solink’s own security policies and standards. OUR VALUES We do things the Solink way: - Act with URGENCY – Our customers move fast, so we do too. - Deliver with QUALITY – We sweat the details and hold a high bar. - Win with TEAM – No egos. Just outcomes, built together. - Lead with TRUST – We earn it through clarity, consistency, and care. These aren’t just words—they shape how we hire, lead, and grow. WHY SOLINK? We’re not just building tech - we’re building a place where great people do great work. - Clarity and trust: Where the role allows, we support flexibility in how and where work gets done - and we’re upfront about what’s required. - Meaningful equity: Every full-time, permanent employee has a stake in our growth. - Comprehensive benefits: Fully paid health & dental (no waiting period) + $500 health spending account. - Wellness support: Monthly reimbursement for fitness, wellness, or mental health programs. - Growth through merit: Advancement is based on contribution, initiative, and the ability to raise the bar - together. - Candid culture: Clear expectations, honest feedback, and no politics. - Social connection: From So-learns to Solink-o and So-lunches, we stay connected in ways that actually feel fun. WHAT TO EXPECT FROM THE HIRING PROCESS We respect your time and value transparency. Here’s a general idea of what to expect: 1. Intro call with our Talent Team 2. Interview with the Hiring Manager 3. Role-relevant task or case (if applicable) 4. Final interviews with cross-functional team members 5. Reference Checks 6. Offer & onboarding 🎉 PLEASE NOTE: THIS IS SUBJECT TO CHANGE AT ANY POINT IN THE RECRUITMENT PROCESS BASED ON THE NEEDS OF THE BUSINESS. HOW TO APPLY Submit your resume and a short cover letter via our Careers Page https://solink.com/careers/. Let us know what excites you about this role, and how you’d help move Solink forward. NOTICE: SOLINK USES ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI) TO SCREEN, ASSESS, AND/OR SELECT CANDIDATES FOR THIS POSITION. SOLINK IS AN EQUAL OPPORTUNITY EMPLOYER. WE’RE COMMITTED TO BUILDING A DIVERSE AND INCLUSIVE WORKPLACE. IF YOU REQUIRE ACCOMMODATION DURING THE SELECTION PROCESS, PLEASE LET US KNOW.