Senior Engineering Lead

About Protexxa

Protexxa is a Canadian cybersecurity company building a human-risk and credential-exposure platform that helps organizations and their people stay ahead of account takeover and identity-based threats. We’re a small, fast-moving team shipping a real product to real customers — which means high ownership, short paths from idea to production, and engineering decisions that actually stick.

We’re looking for an Engineering Lead who is equally comfortable shaping architecture in a design doc and shipping the feature themselves. You’ll set technical direction across a full-stack, cloud-native product, build the paved road that lets everyone ship securely and fast, and lead a small development team (internal engineers plus a distributed/offshore partner). Security isn’t a side quest here — it’s the product and the way we build.

• Level: Senior
• Location & work model: Hybrid — onsite in Toronto, ON
• Employment type: Full-time
• Reports to: Director, Customer Success & Product

• Lead the team. Set technical direction and standards, mentor engineers, run code review, and own delivery quality. Coordinate sprint cadence and the quality bar across internal and offshore engineers.
• Stay hands‑on. Design and ship full-stack features end to end — frontend, backend, and the APIs in between.
• Own the cloud‑native architecture. Containers, serverless, and infrastructure‑as‑code across AWS and GCP, built for scale and reliability.
• Build the paved road (Dev Sec Ops ). CI/CD pipelines with automated testing and security gates baked in — SAST/DAST, dependency and secrets scanning, secure‑by‑default defaults — so security is a property of the pipeline, not a manual step.
• Set the bar for AI‑assisted development. Define how the team uses AI coding tools (we work with Claude / Claude Code) responsibly — where they accelerate delivery and where human review and security checks stay non‑negotiable.
• Partner with product. Translate the roadmap into well‑scoped, deliverable work and make sensible build/sequence calls.
• Raise engineering quality. Drive test coverage, observability, and operational reliability across the stack.
• Support our compliance posture. Keep practices audit‑ready (SOC
  2) through secure SDLC habits and evidence that’s a by‑product of how we work.

• Years of experience building and shipping production full‑stack applications (modern frontend + backend services).
• Strong command of a modern stack — e.g., React/Type Script on the front end with Node, Python, or Go on the back end — and well‑designed REST/GraphQL APIs.
• Deep cloud‑native experience on AWS and/or GCP: containers (Docker/Kubernetes), serverless, and IaC (Terraform/Cloud Formation).
• Hands‑on Dev Sec Ops : building CI/CD pipelines, automated security testing, secrets management, and a secure software development life cycle.
• Experience running or leading a development team — mentoring, technical direction, and owning delivery, including with distributed teams.
• Solid grounding in application security fundamentals (authn/authz, common vulnerability classes, secure coding).
• Fluency using AI‑powered coding assistants/agentic tools — i.e., Cursor, Claude Code, Codex, Antigravity, KIRO.

• Cybersecurity or identity domain experience — OIDC, SAML, passkeys/Web Authn, IAM/identity brokering.
• Experience in a SOC 2 or otherwise regulated/compliance‑driven environment.
• Track record coordinating with offshore or distributed engineering team members.
• Exposure to ML/AI‑adjacent products or data pipelines.
• Track record of maturing and scaling a product beyond its initial launch.
• Certifications in AWS or GCP cloud development and architecture.

• Cloud: AWS + GCP, containerized services, infrastructure‑as‑code.
• Identity & security: modern auth (OIDC/SAML, passkeys), security gates in CI/CD, SOC 2 posture.
• Team: small and high‑ownership, internal + distributed partner, direct line to product and leadership.

• Competitive base salary.
• Meaningful equity in an early‑stage company.
• Commission on sales you personally close.
• Discretionary annual bonus.
• Comprehensive health benefits package.
• Paid vacation.
• You will be provided with the necessary equipment and accessories to perform your role.

Protexxa is an equal-opportunity employer. We welcome applicants of all backgrounds and are committed to an inclusive hiring process. Accommodations are available on request at any stage.