Developer - Engage Team

Overview

Join to apply for the Staff Developer - Engage Team role at Loblaw Digital
.

From our office in Downtown Toronto, Loblaw Digital has built leading eCommerce experiences in online grocery, beauty, pharmacy, and apparel. We’re focused on delivering the best, most innovative experiences for customers across Canada.

Why is this role important? As a Staff Backend Developer at Loblaw Digital, you will serve as a strategic technical leader across core platform experiences within the Engage domain, including Gateway orchestration, Server-Driven UI (SDUI), and Backend for Frontend (BFF) architecture. You’ll partner with cross-functional teams to architect scalable APIs, power dynamic experiences, and enable composable feature delivery across banners like PC Express, Shoppers Drug Mart, and Joe Fresh.

This is a leadership role that shapes the technical direction of shared infrastructure powering millions of customer interactions per day.

Technical Strategy & Architecture:

• Define and evolve the architecture of Gateway, OneBFF, and SDUI backend services to support multi-banner, multi-tenant delivery.
• Own and advocate for the long-term technical vision behind server-driven page composition and orchestration layers (e.g., layout resolver, view resolver).
• Lead and contribute to high-impact Technical Design Documents (TDDs) with clear tradeoffs, scaling patterns, and roadmap implications.

Systems Design & Implementation:

• Build and optimize high-throughput backend services using Node.js, Type Script, and Java/Kotlin, with integration to systems like Helios, Assetful, and upstream services.
• Implement caching, observability, and graceful degradation patterns across SDUI surfaces.
• Champion schema evolution strategies (e.g., Graph
  
  QL federation, REST layering, JSON layouts) for forward compatibility and resilience.

Cross-Team Leadership &

Collaboration:

• Partner with Frontend and Mobile Staff Developers to define the API contracts, SDUI component APIs, and backend composition rules.
• Guide vertical teams (PDP, Browse, Homepage) in integrating with shared BFF and SDUI systems, ensuring performance and developer experience.
• Represent Gateway and BFF concerns in domain-wide conversations around performance, experimentation, personalization, and SSR.

Platform Enablement:

• Drive initiatives that improve developer productivity, such as API mocking frameworks, CI pipelines, and schema validators for SDUI layout payloads.
• Contribute to platform-wide observability (Snowplow, OTEL), error handling, and tracing efforts to support performance-led engineering.
• Shape reusability strategies and modularization efforts across backend repositories.

• 8+ years of backend development experience with modern service-oriented architecture.
• Deep expertise in at least one backend language (Node.js/Type Script preferred, Java/Kotlin acceptable).
• Proven experience designing composable APIs, orchestration layers, or middleware gateways.
• Experience leading backend architecture for dynamic frontend experiences (e.g., SDUI, layout-as-data, CMS-driven rendering).
• Strong knowledge of API contract design, caching, observability (OTEL, Datadog), and production hardening techniques.
• Demonstrated ability to lead cross-functional projects and mentor other engineers.
• Comfort with ambiguity, excellent written communication, and a track record of delivering high-leverage platform work.

• Experience with Graph
  
  QL, Next.js, React SSR, or Framer Motion is a plus.
• Familiarity with multi-banner / multi-tenant product platforms.
• Understanding of performance instrumentation, deep linking, and BFF unification strategies.
• Contributions to design systems, layout renderers, or SDUI SDKs.

• Building or operating high-throughput API Gateways (internal or external-facing).
• Experience with Apigee Edge/X, Kong, Express Gateway, or custom Node.js middleware orchestration layers.
• Deep understanding of rate limiting, token forwarding, header injection, proxy chaining, and other common gateway patterns.
• Designing multi-tenant routing, fallback behaviours, and token introspection across a distributed gateway mesh.