Tech Lead

Department: Portfolio Companies

Location: Toronto, Ontario, Remote (Canada)

Employment Type: FullTime

Where the work is

Beacon buys great vertical software businesses and makes them dramatically more valuable, not by squeezing them, but by giving them world-class engineering and AI leadership they could never hire on their own. Our engineers go where the work is: embedded inside a single business, owning its technology end to end, and compounding its enterprise value quarter over quarter.

This role is one of those seats. You will be the technical leader for a mature, profitable B2B SaaS platform in our portfolio — an established product with real customers, real revenue, and years of accumulated code behind it. You wont advise from the outside. Youll own the codebase, set the roadmap, and be measured on the value you create.

Be clear-eyed about the shape of this job: for the foreseeable future, you are the engineering team. There is no one to delegate to and no one to hide behind. Everything technical is yours — the architecture, the deploys, the incidents, the vendor calls, the hard prioritization calls about what doesnt get built. The people who thrive in this seat are the ones who find that clarifying rather than daunting, and who create leverage through automation and good architecture instead of headcount.

The platform is established and profitable, and the mandate is to reimagine its core workflows with AI at the center, retire the expensive third-party dependencies it has outgrown, and cut the operational drag that currently taxes engineering. Youre the technical leader who owns that from the front.

Were looking for a jack of all trades, a strong generalist who can go deep where it counts. The good news on the stack: this business is already close to where Beacon is going — Python and TypeScript services on AWS, React on the front end, Kubernetes, Postgres, Terraform. There is no legacy-platform tax to pay here. The leverage is in delivery discipline, in the parts of the platform that grew organically and now need real architecture, and in the AI surface that doesnt exist yet. Youll be the one who builds all three.

What youll do

• Own the technical and product roadmap. Decide what gets built and why, in partnership with the GM, the pods product team, and customers. Translate business priorities into a sequenced engineering plan youre accountable for — and defend the tradeoffs when everything is urgent.

• Drive everything technical. Architecture, code quality, security, data modeling, performance, release engineering, and the migration path off the vendors we no longer want to depend on. You set the bar and you make the final technical decision.

• Ship AI that changes the business, not demos. Take the AI surface from plan to production: evals, guardrails, tenant-safe tool use, and features customers feel. You know when to lean on a foundation model, when a deterministic pipeline is the correct answer, and how to keep agentic workflows on the rails in a multi-tenant system.

• Operate as a team of one, and build like you wont be. Ruthless prioritization, small safe changes, and automation over heroics. Leave behind a codebase, a test suite, and documentation that a second and third engineer can join without a three-month archaeology project — because if you create the value, thats the next conversation.

• Increase velocity and harden the codebase. Trunk-based development, real CI, a staging environment on synthetic data rather than stale production records, feature flags, meaningful test coverage, and a deploy path that doesnt depend on you remembering it. Then pay down the risk in the parts that grew organically so the platform can carry far more weight than it does today.

• Own the operating cost. You have enough cloud and vendor cost literacy to find the line item nobody has looked at, and the engineering judgment to know whether the fix is worth the week.

• Own security and data handling as engineering work. Least-privilege access to production, sensitive data kept out of non-production environments, and a posture you can defend to Beacon Legal and to a customers security review.

• Be the technical face of the business. Earn the trust of operators and customers, set expectations honestly, and communicate clearly in writing.

What were looking for

• A senior Python and TypeScript engineer — day one. Deep, current experience with Python backend services and Node/TypeScript, comfortable owning a large, mature codebase immediately: reading it, fixing it, and reshaping it with judgment. This is the non-negotiable starting requirement.

• A genuine generalist (jack of all trades). Youre T-shaped and you pick up new stacks quickly and enjoy it. You can move across web, mobile, data, infra, and AI without waiting for permission.

• Cloud and SQL depth. Youve designed, deployed, and operated real systems on AWS — containers on Kubernetes, queues and event-driven workers, infrastructure-as-code — and you can model, query, tune, and reason about production Postgres.

• Release engineering conviction. You have personally introduced trunk-based development, automated testing, and environment discipline to a codebase that didnt have them, without stopping delivery to do it.

• AI-native engineering. Youve shipped production software on foundation models — retrieval, tool use, evals, guardrails — not just prototypes, and you have a point of view on doing it safely in a multi-tenant product.

• Proven sole ownership. Youve been the only engineer, or the clear technical owner, on a system that mattered: design, build, deploy, on-call, and the customer conversation when it broke. You know how to carry that without burning out or cutting the corners that come back.

• Product and business instinct. You can read what actually drives the business, prioritize accordingly, and defend a roadmap to a GM and to customers. You can tell which technical debt is actively costing money and which is merely ugly, and you spend your credibility on the former.

• A strong writer and communicator who builds trust with non-engineers. In a team of one, written clarity is how the rest of the business knows whats happening.

Nice to have

• Multi-tenant SaaS architecture, and the isolation and access-control problems that come with it.

• Event-driven and queue-backed systems at meaningful volume — throughput, backpressure, idempotency, and what happens when a downstream provider degrades.

• Cross-platform mobile experience, and comfort maintaining a mobile release channel alongside everything else.

• Third-party integration work at depth: REST APIs, webhooks, file-based handoffs, and the unglamorous reality of integrating with customer systems that have no API and no documentation.

• Security and privacy engineering — SOC 2, PII minimization, encryption, secrets management, audit logging.

• Experience retiring a costly vendor dependency by building the replacement in-house, without a disruptive rewrite.

• Vertical or B2B SaaS experience, especially where the buyer and the end user are different people.

Our Values at Beacon Software

• Humility: We acknowledge that the path to getting to the right answer involves being wrong along the way. We have strong beliefs which are weakly held. We actively seek new ideas and believe we can learn from anyone at any time.

• Honesty: We are truth seeking in our approach to business problems. Business is a repeat game and we believe that human relationships generate alpha. We understand that trust is earned over a lifetime and can be lost in an instant.

• Hunger: We play to win. We hold ourselves to high standards and will not be outworked. We take pride in having a deep sense of responsibility to ourselves, each other, our partners, and our customers. We believe to whom much is given much is expected.

• Horizon: We seek to build a generational software company. This will take decades. We manage our expectations and those of our partners to take advantage of the 8th wonder of the world - compounding growth.

How We Use AI in Our Hiring Process: To ensure transparency, we want candidates to know that Beacon Software uses Artificial Intelligence and AI-enabled tools to assist with screening, reviewing, organizing and highlighting profiles and applications that match the key requirements for each role.

AI does not make hiring decisions: Every application is reviewed by a member of our team, and all decisions throughout the process are made by humans. We use AI to support efficiency and consistency, not to replace human judgment. We are committed to a fair, thoughtful, and equitable experience for every candidate.