Senior Backend Engineer

BiblioCommons is a Toronto-based software company that builds SaaS solutions for public libraries.

Our team is passionate about making public libraries accessible, delightful and engaging, while having fun at the same time .

A lot of companies tout 'social impact', here at BiblioCommons, we serve millions of diverse users each month by partnering with public libraries in Canada, the US, and New Zealand.

Libraries are more than just book stacks.

They are public spaces that foster learning, connection and community, and BiblioCommons is bringing that community online with clever software that powers the world's largest libraries.

Engineering @ BiblioCommons

Our engineering team puts the patron first by building user-friendly, accessible and scalable solutions that equip libraries to leverage best-in-class technology practices to serve their diverse communities.

We’re a highly collaborative team that applies innovative solutions to challenging problems.

We believe strongly in shipping code early and often, and investing heavily in automation to make that possible.

We’re also committed to doing things right and always looking for ways to do them better.

We take the time to optimize and redesign systems to ensure they are robust and scalable.

We are looking for a Senior Backend Engineer on our BiblioCore team to build new and existing platforms that will help millions of library users discover more physical and digital content.

This is an exciting opportunity to design and implement challenging scalable and resilient systems, while being a technical leader and a mentor to the team.

This role will also enable exercising leadership skills by leading projects, collaborating with multiple teams and making an impact on the growth of the business.

The ideal candidate will embrace AI-first development practices: working with coding agents through spec-driven development, weaving agentic workflows into the software development lifecycle, and helping the broader team move faster and build smarter.

You will enjoy and be successful in this role if you are:

• Great at debugging distributed systems

• Not afraid to step out of your comfort zone and dive deep

• Accountable and take ownership of your work

• Awesome at teaching others your skills

• Excited to accelerate the adoption of AI-enabled development, not just using AI tools yourself, but also helping establish the workflows and habits to enable the team to use them well

• Experienced in directing coding agents with clear, well-scoped specs, and convinced that the quality of the spec drives the quality of the output

• Delivery focused and giving your best effort all the time

• Creative and enjoys brainstorming ideas with others to come up with the right solution

• Supportive and enjoys working as part of a team

• Passionate to self-improve

• Never content with the status quo. You are always looking to automate, improve processes, and follow best practices

How you will make an impact:

• Build new platforms and improve existing systems to enable millions of users to discover and consume relevant library content

• Integrate and work with third-party API solutions to augment BiblioCore functionality

• Champion AI-first development practices across the team, including the safe, effective integration of AI into our products and workflows, and helping establish the standards and judgment that ensure we move fast without sacrificing quality

• Practice spec-driven development with coding agents: turning requirements into clear, testable specifications that agents can execute against, and reviewing agent output with a senior engineer's judgment

• Design and champion agentic workflows across the SDLC, applying AI agents to planning, coding, code review, testing, documentation, and operations, and helping the team adopt the ones that prove their value

• Use AI coding assistants and coding agents (e.g., Claude Code, Amazon Q, Copilot, or similar LLM-powered tools) to streamline workflows, generate high-quality code, and enhance productivity

• Guide the technical direction for technical initiatives to account for scalability, resiliency, quality and security of BiblioCore

• Take ownership for the design, development, and operationalization of features and systems

• Tackle tech debt at the right times for faster feature delivery

• Troubleshoot and perform root cause analysis on systemic issues

• Participate in code review and best practice discussions

• Be a mentor to Junior and Intermediate Engineers

What you will bring to the team:

• 7+ years of professional backend software development experience

• Proven experience with: Spring, Maven/Gradle and related Java technologies

• Strong theoretical foundation in data structures, algorithms, and software engineering best practices

• Demonstrated experience with AI-enabled development, including hands-on use of coding agents and AI coding tools, and helping teams adopt modern AI-assisted workflows

• Experience with spec-driven development using coding agents: writing specifications that guide agents to correct, maintainable code, and iterating on specs rather than hand-editing agent output

• Familiarity or hands-on experience with agentic workflows in the SDLC, such as agent-assisted code review, automated test generation, agent-driven refactoring, or AI-supported incident analysis

• Extensive experience building RESTful API applications and consuming third-party API integrations

• Experience debugging and optimizing large-scale, multi-threaded systems

• Have a mindset for end to end ownership of services

• Passionate, motivated, and capable of working autonomously

• Strong communication skills and collaborative across teams

• Knowledge of best practice industry techniques, tools and frameworks