Staff Software Engineer

About Us:

Ground News is a platform that makes it easy to compare news sources, read between the lines of media bias and break free from algorithms.

In a world where political polarization and media distrust are at an all-time high, Ground News offers people a better way to stay informed and see every side of the story. Our mobile app, web app, and browser extension are home to a community of mindful readers who use our news comparison platform to engage with news beyond their filter bubble.

Unlike most news companies, our values do not align with any specific political ideology. Unlike most tech platforms, we don’t rely on algorithms to keep users on our platform to sell more ads. We are supported by our readers who pay for a subscription to build a more nuanced understanding of the news, the world, and themselves.

The Opportunity: Staff Software Engineer

As a Staff Software Engineer, you’ll play a pivotal role in keeping the systems behind Ground News fast, reliable, and ready to scale for millions of readers. You’ll sit within our backend chapter and work out of the Platform & Infrastructure pod, splitting your time across enabling backend feature development and the SRE-style work that keeps our services healthy in production. Reporting to the Head of Engineering, you will work closely with the engineering team to design, build, and operate the services that empower our users to see every side of the story.

This is a hands-on role where you’ll bring fresh ideas to a fast-growing consumer platform, balancing technical excellence with operational rigor. From designing and shipping backend services to improving observability, reliability, and incident response, your work will directly impact how dependably people engage with the world’s news.

You’ll also be a key liaison between Customer Success and the broader product and engineering teams, translating user-facing issues into technical action and closing the loop back to the people who hear from our readers every day. As a senior voice in code review, you’ll help raise the bar and expedite the PR process across backend and infrastructure, while also supporting the frontend wherever you can, and you’ll bring that same perspective to our architecture and systems discussions.

What You’ll Do:

• Take on SRE-shaped responsibilities such as monitoring, alerting, incident response, and performance tuning to keep our services reliable and scalable in production.

• Manage infrastructure as code and deployment workflows across AWS and GCP, using Kubernetes and OpenTofu (Terraform) to ship changes safely.

• Act as a senior voice in code review, expediting the PR process primarily across backend and infrastructure while also supporting the frontend where possible.

• Partner with Customer Success to triage, prioritize, and resolve user-impacting issues, and relay that context back to the broader product and engineering teams.

• Contribute a senior voice to architecture and systems design discussions, helping steer technical decisions in the right direction.

• Champion high engineering quality through testing, code reviews, observability, and thoughtful operational practices.

• Own the services you build, monitoring system health and responding to incidents with urgency.

What You’ll Bring:

• 15+ years of experience maintaining and operating high-performing, production backend systems.

• Deep expertise in Node.js and TypeScript.

• Strong experience designing, building, and integrating RESTful APIs and the services behind them.

• Solid knowledge of distributed systems design and architecture patterns, with the ability to make and communicate sound architectural decisions at scale.

• Hands-on experience operating services in the cloud (AWS and/or GCP), including containerized workloads with Kubernetes and infrastructure as code with Terraform.

• SRE-oriented experience: monitoring, alerting, incident response, and performance optimization for production systems.

• Experience with data stores and event-driven systems such as PostgreSQL, Elasticsearch/OpenSearch, and message queues or streams (Kafka, SQS, or Pub/Sub).

• A track record of shipping and scaling reliable services for a successful consumer product.

• Experience planning and executing rollouts safely, including monitoring stability and mitigating risk.

• A collaborative approach to code review and cross-functional work, comfortable acting as a senior voice and partnering with non-engineering teams like Customer Success.

Why Work at Ground?

Co-founded by a former NASA engineer and Bain consultant, a position with Ground News provides an unparalleled learning experience both personally and professionally. At Ground, we prioritize growth: both for our business and team members. You’ll have the freedom to work remotely and play a key role in the development of Ground News products.

This is an opportunity to work with a growing and mighty team that is fighting every day to build a world where cooperative, civil debate is the norm, media is accountable, and critical thought is the baseline of our information consumption. Ground is based in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada, but this role is remote.

Our culture is one of collaboration, creativity, and diverse perspectives. If you have any questions, concerns, or requests regarding accessibility needs, please contact [email protected], and a member of our team will be happy to help.