Lead Backend Engineer for Distributed Systems and Control Planes

Job Title: Lead Backend Engineer (Distributed Systems & Control Planes)

Location: Fully Remote (Need to reside in Greater Vancouver BC, Canada)

Visa: Can sponsor work-permit and PR in Canada

Compensation (commensurate with experience/profile): $140K-$175K CAD annual, plus equity

Level: Staff / Principal

Reports To: CEO

The Mission

SmartVerify is decoupling data security from application security. As Generative AI transforms applications from predictable tools into dynamic security risks, enterprises can no longer rely on AppSec as a proxy for Data Security. They need granular, reliable control. SmartVerify is that control layer. We are building a distributed security grid that enforces policy at the edge. We need a Lead Engineer to build the Control Plane. This is the central component that orchestrates security policies across thousands of nodes in real-time.

The Role

• This is a Staff/ Principal Engineer role.
• You will own the architecture and implementation of the SmartVerify Control Plane. While the Data Plane handles the traffic, your code provides the intelligence.
• Instead of just building CRUD APIs, you are building a state synchronization engine. Your system will maintain real-time connections to thousands of sidecars, resolving complex security policies into low-level configurations and pushing updates instantly across the fleet without connection drops.
• You will master Envoy Proxy and the xDS protocol (prior experience with these is a big plus) to turn our logical security policies into enforced network reality.

The Tech Stack

• Core Language: Go (Golang) — Heavy use of concurrency patterns.
• Communication: gRPC, Protocol Buffers, Bidirectional Streaming.
• Architecture: Event-Driven, Distributed State Management.
• Infrastructure: AWS (EKS, Lambda), Kubernetes, Docker.
• Data: PostgreSQL, DynamoDB.

Requirements

• 6+ Years of Backend Engineering with a specific focus on distributed systems, infrastructure, or platform engineering.
• Go (Golang) Mastery: You understand channels, goroutines, and memory management at a deep level.
• System Architecture: You have built systems that configure or manage other systems.
• Examples of relevant experience: Building Kubernetes Operators/Controllers, Service Discovery (Consul/Etcd), Feature Flag engines, or custom Load Balancer logic.
• gRPC & Protobuf Expertise: You know more than just how to define a service. You understand streaming RPCs, connection management, and backward compatibility.
• High-Scale Thinking: You understand the challenges of the "Thundering Herd" problem, eventual consistency, and managing state across thousands of persistent connections.
• Startup Mindset: We are pre-seed. You are comfortable making architectural decisions that balance "perfect" with "shipped."

Nice to Haves

• Familiarity with Envoy Proxy, Istio, or Linkerd
• Experience with WASM, Lua, or writing plugins for Nginx/HAProxy.
• Experience with Open Policy Agent (OPA) or writing compiler/interpreter logic.
• Background in cybersecurity (Zero Trust, mTLS, SPIFFE).

Why Join SmartVerify?

• Solve Hard Problems: This isn't a standard REST API role. You are solving problems related to distributed state, latency, and grid computing.
• AI-Ready Security: You are building the infrastructure that will enable enterprises to safely adopt the next generation of AI tools.
• Architectural Ownership: You will define how our Control Plane scales from Day 1 to Day 1,000.
• Equity upside: the role will be compensated with equity that is commensurate with value creation from solving hard technical problems.
• Remote-first team. Flexible schedule. PR Sponsorship in Canada.