Principal Software Architect - FinTech

Location: Montréal, QC — Full-time, in-office

Leadership: 60% hands-on engineering / 40% mentorship & process

Experience: 7+ years in production fintech or equivalent

Company Description

BIASafe is the end-to-end operating system for systematic investing. We provide asset managers and family offices with a pre-built, institutional-grade platform that allows lean investment teams to build and launch production-ready systematic mandates in minutes rather than months, without the quant infrastructure overhead.

We are in Beta and handling real financial transactions. Our engineering team combines deep quantitative research capability with a fast-moving startup pace; and we are now at the stage where the production resilience of our systems is the defining challenge. The code we ship touches real assets. The margin for error is zero.

Role Description

This is a leadership role for a senior engineer who excels as a player-coach. You are the primary bridge between business strategy and technical execution, responsible for professionalising a junior engineering team and ensuring that every line of code that ships is resilient enough for high-stakes financial transactions.

Communication and mentorship are core components of this position. You will spend 60% of your time on hands-on engineering and 40% on mentorship and process ownership. Success in this role means translating product roadmaps into predictable timelines, and raising the technical baseline of the team through instructional code reviews and direct, senior-to-junior feedback.

You will have real authority over how we build; and real accountability for what ships. This is not a role where the architecture has already been decided and execution is the only remaining variable.

Qualifications

* Professional Experience:  7+ years of software engineering, with meaningful time in production fintech, trading systems, or equivalently regulated, high-stakes environments.

* Engineering Leadership:  A track record of raising a team’s technical baseline through code review, pairing, and documentation, not just fixing output. “ABLE TO BUILD & TRACK A ROADMAP.”

* Technical Mastery:  Deep comfort with backend service design, relational databases, async systems, and background job orchestration.

* Observability Expertise: Hands-on experience with structured logging, distributed tracing, metrics, and alerting, and a clear philosophy about what good looks like.

* DevOps & CI/CD: Practical experience owning or contributing to CI/CD pipelines, containerised deployment environments (Docker, Kubernetes), and infrastructure-as-code practices. You understand the full path from a developer's commit to a running production service — and you can identify where it breaks.

* Process Ownership:  Proficiency in owning the sprint process end-to-end (ticket scoping, prioritisation, estimation, and retrospectives) without a dedicated project manager.

* Communication:  Exceptional clarity when translating technical risk into business impact for founders and non-technical stakeholders.

* Location:  This is a full-time, in-office role at our Montréal headquarters. Professional proficiency in French is highly valued.

Core Responsibilities

* Code Quality & Mentorship:  Own the code review process end-to-end. Enforce rigorous engineering standards to ensure junior and intern output is production-ready before it reaches the pipeline — and actively teach the patterns that make it so.

* Production Integrity:  Identify and remediate race conditions, idempotency gaps, and error-handling failures before they reach production. Be the last technical gate between research-quality code and real money.

* DevOps & Deployment Rigour: Work alongside our infrastructure lead to ensure the deployment pipeline is reliable, reproducible, and environment-consistent. Own the standards that govern how code moves from development to staging to production — including rollback procedures, environment parity, and release gates appropriate for a financial system.

* Product Timelines:  Own the translation of product roadmaps into scoped, estimated engineering timelines. Serve as the primary interface between business goals and development capacity, with the ability to surface trade-offs clearly.

* Observability:  Ensure every critical system path is instrumented, logged, and covered by meaningful alerts. Failures should be understood by root cause within minutes, not hours.

Benefits & Perks

* Competitive Compensation:  Base salary benchmarked to senior individual contributor market rates, plus significant equity participation at an early and high-growth stage.

* High Influence Environment:  Direct access to founders with the technical context and organisational authority to act on your recommendations.

* Meaningful Problem:  The opportunity to set an engineering standard from the ground up, in a domain (systematic investing) that is undergoing fundamental change driven by AI.