Staff Engineer (Backend), Market Innovations

About the role: What's in the Box

Our New Ventures team is focused on growing our global footprint by launching our core products in new markets and expanding across multiple brands and verticals. We’re a globally distributed team operating across 7+ brands in 15+ countries, building desirable products and seamless, engaging experiences that customers haven’t seen before. With many exciting projects underway, we’re driven to generate the next billion-dollar business—so if you’re passionate about tackling bold challenges, join us!

We are a close-knit group of engineers of different stripes - developers, designers, and product owners - who are working together to solve interesting e-commerce and supply chain problems around how people eat. Sometimes, this involves implementing features to improve the user journey and making it easier for our customers to buy amazing food. Other times, this means creating stable software solutions that keep our distribution centers running.

We are looking for an engineer to help implement solutions & write beautiful code, working with various team members as we build out our consumer facing applications & the infrastructure that supports them. As a member of our Toronto team, you’ll work with highly-skilled engineers, who in collaboration with our other global teams, have turned HelloFresh into the #1 meal delivery service in the world!

What You’ll Do: The Recipe

• Lead the design and delivery of scalable backend platforms and distributed systems, leveraging AI-assisted and agentic engineering workflows to accelerate delivery and improve system quality.

• Drive technical discovery, requirements refinement, and solution architecture in ambiguous problem spaces, translating product and business goals into scalable execution strategies.

• Design and optimize AI-enabled development workflows, including spec-driven development, agent orchestration, context management, automated verification, and quality validation.

• Partner closely with product, platform, and engineering teams to foster a strong product engineering mindset focused on customer value, experimentation, and measurable outcomes.

• Lead architectural discussions, mentor engineers in modern backend and AI-assisted engineering practices, and establish standards for observability, quality engineering, and system reliability.

• Evaluate emerging technologies and AI tooling to continuously enhance engineering effectiveness, software quality, and organizational scalability while ensuring strong human oversight and operational accountability.

What You’ll Bring: The Ingredients

• Strong experience with microservice architectures, event-driven systems (e.g. Kafka, RabbitMQ), and distributed systems design patterns.

• Hands-on experience with Docker, Kubernetes, and modern CI/CD practices in production environments.

• Proficiency with relational and document databases, including PostgreSQL, MySQL, and/or MongoDB.

• AI proficiency and advocacy. Hands-on experience leveraging AI technologies through AI-assisted engineering workflows, LLM integrations, agentic development patterns, or ML-driven product capabilities to improve engineering velocity and product outcomes.

• Proficiency and production experience with one or more backend languages such as Golang, Python, or Java.

• Strong communication and collaboration skills. You are comfortable working closely with frontend engineers, designers, product managers, and distributed teams, and can influence technical direction while bringing clarity to complex topics.

What we Offer: The Toppings

• Box Discount - Amazing discounts on 1 box per week! 75% discount on weekly HelloFresh and Chefs Plate meal kits AND 50% off weekly Factor meal box.

• Health & Wellness - Health & Dental benefits from day 1, a Health Spending Account, unlimited access to the Headspace app to meet your self-care needs, and 25% discount on GoodLife fitness memberships!

• RRSP Matching - Competitive RRSP matching program offered

• Vacation & PTO - Time off is also an important part of self-care! We offer generous vacation and PTO to help you create a good work-life balance.

• Family Benefits - A parental leave top-up program for expectant parents.

• Growth & Development - We support your career progression and invest in your continued learning through experiences and initiatives owned by our dedicated L&D team

• Work Hard & Have Fun - From team socials to engaging company days, you’ll have plenty of opportunity to experience the fun!

• Diversity & Inclusion Initiatives - With impactful ERG’s like FreshPride, Women Empowered and LIMES, we are committed to our diversity, equity & inclusion efforts.

• Food Puns - this one is kind of a big dill if you haven’t already noticed. We even have some punny meeting room names!

Flexible Hybrid Approach

At HelloFresh, we know that flexible work arrangements are essential in enabling you to do your best work, while balancing your personal and life needs. Offering remote work flexibility, along with the opportunity to interact and collaborate in the office are all a part of creating a great employee experience.

To meet these needs, we are pleased to provide Flexible Hybrid work. Flexible Hybrid is a people-first approach that is based on choice, trust, personalization, and empowers teams to choose when and how often they work from the office and work from home, in addition to team days and company days. This means a minimum of 2 days in office per week, with most teams in office between 2-3 days a week.

#LI-HYBRID Toronto, ON Pay Range $180,000—$215,000 CAD