Senior Developer - Backend Foundations

About The Role

Hi, I'm Steve. I lead the Backend Foundations team at Jane, where we steward how our core platform scales, modernizes, and enables teams to move faster. We own the main Rails monolith and are building a suite of libraries, frameworks, and services that teams across the company depend on - things like file handling, encryption, background job processing, and modern development practices.

As we move into the AI era, we are also empowering teams by encoding our hard‑won domain knowledge into skills that the rest of the organization can utilize.

The work is equally divided into two key streams: first, evolving and transforming our existing production systems — upgrading Rails versions, untangling long‑standing architectural constraints, and moving from outdated patterns to current best practices. We’re also building new platform offerings that prevent teams from solving the same problem multiple times over. It's the kind of work where you see the direct impact - both on how our customers' data flows through our systems and on how your teammates can do their best work.

I've been here just over a year, and one thing I love about this team is the autonomy. We're not handed a roadmap with every little stop marked out - we stay deeply connected to what our customers need and what makes engineering sense, then we chart our own course. That's also the hard part: we're constantly asking ourselves what's actually important, what we can let go of, and where to focus our energy.

I'm looking for someone who shares this team's hunger to build better systems, cares about making the technical bar higher for everyone, and gets energized by the work of turning something messy into something elegant.

This role is meaningful because you'll shape how teams across Jane access foundational services and standards. You'll help us move from reactive maintenance to proactive platform thinking - and that shift is exactly what makes our customers and our teammates more successful.

• Lead the design and delivery of platform services and libraries that teams across Jane adopt and rely on, balancing transformational work with new capability building.
• Drive improvements to the main Rails monolith - upgrading dependencies, improving architecture, and raising code quality standards so teams can move with confidence.
• Partner with feature teams to understand their needs, propose scalable solutions, and mentor them through implementation, removing blockers along the way.
• Own the full lifecycle of technical projects from planning through production - ensuring security, reliability, and performance remain high as we grow.
• Champion a culture of continuous improvement by documenting decisions, sharing learnings, and helping the team develop deeper expertise across the technical domains we steward.

• 8+ years of professional full‑stack software development experience, with demonstrated expertise in backend systems (ideally with Ruby and Rails, though we value depth in any robust language) and modern frontend development with React.
• Proven ability to lead the design and delivery of medium to complex technical projects independently, with strong architectural thinking and the judgment to know when to simplify versus when to invest in scalability.
• AI is already part of how you work – you're actively using AI tools in your development workflow, and you have opinions on when and how they make you more effective.
• Experience working within and evolving established, production‑grade codebases — specifically, you're energized by the challenge of transforming a well‑supported Rails monolith into a modular platform, not just building greenfield.
• Strong communication skills: you can explain complex technical decisions to peers, write clear documentation, and collaborate effectively across teams to unblock work and align on direction.

If you don't meet every single qualification but are excited about this role, we'd still love to hear from you.

Jane is a founder‑led, high‑growth SaaS company born in North Vancouver, British Columbia. We’re now a team of more than 700 people…