Director of Engineering

Join to apply for the Director of Engineering role at Blue J

NOTE: While we are posting this position now, we do not anticipate starting interviews until the first or second week of January!

About Blue J

Blue J builds the most advanced tax research technology in the world. Our customers are tax professionals who rely on us to deliver fast, accurate insights that help them serve their clients with confidence. Since launching our flagship generative AI product, we have consistently exceeded revenue targets and are scaling rapidly into new product areas and markets.

Our engineering team is known for building high quality systems, moving fast through lean practices, and shipping multiple times per day with confidence. We value thoughtful system design, strong software fundamentals, and a culture of collaboration and continuous learning.

We recently raised a significant funding round to accelerate product and platform development, and we are expanding our engineering leadership team to support this growth.

A Note on Location

This is a remote role requiring candidates to be within driving distance of Toronto for in‑person meetings 1 to 2 times per quarter. All candidates must be eligible to work in Canada.

About The Role

We are looking for a Director of Engineering that will guide the evolution of Blue J’s platform architecture and help our engineering teams deliver high quality products at speed. This role is ideal for someone who is a strong system designer, deeply experienced with SaaS platforms, and energized by helping teams navigate technical complexity. You will work closely with product, engineering, and research to define platform direction, build reliable and scalable systems, and ensure our teams have the tools and infrastructure they need to ship confidently and frequently. This leader will coach senior engineers, help untangle difficult architectural challenges, jump into code and designs when needed, and grow a platform team made up of strong SDII and senior engineers.

This is a director title, but the spirit of the role is a hands on technical leader who enjoys building, mentoring, and shaping the foundational platform that enables world class product development.

What You Will Be Doing

Setting Direction

• Collaborating with product and engineering leaders to define platform goals and priorities
• Owning the long term vision for platform capabilities that support reliability, scalability, developer experience, and speed of delivery
• Identifying focus areas to improve architecture, infrastructure, system performance, and cross team technical alignment

Enabling High Quality Delivery

• Leading platform engineers to design and build foundational systems and internal tools
• Going deep into architecture and designs to guide teams through ambiguity and complexity
• Helping engineers make architectural tradeoffs that balance speed with long term maintainability
• Ensuring projects stay on track and are communicated clearly to stakeholders
• Supporting teams in shipping frequently, safely, and with high confidence, consistent with Blue J’s engineering culture

Strengthening the Engineering Organization

• Coaching and developing engineers into strong system thinkers and leaders
• Improving engineering practices that support quality, lean iteration, strong testing, and healthy system design
• Hiring high performing engineers who raise the bar
• Creating clarity around ownership, mandates, interfaces, and platform boundaries across pods

What You Offer Blue J

• 10+ years of hands‑on experience designing and building distributed backend systems, including service‑oriented and event‑driven architectures.
• 5+ years leading software engineering or data platform teams with demonstrated success growing and developing high‑performing groups.
• Strong architectural foundation with experience owning complex systems end‑to‑end; including roadmap creation, system design, implementation, and long‑term evolution.
• Experience with data ingestion, transformation, and indexing pipelines, ideally involving streaming architectures or retrieval workflows.
• Ability to design and reason about scalable distributed systems, including performance, reliability, consistency, and cost tradeoffs.
• Demonstrated ability to operate as a senior/staff‑level IC when needed, especially during early context‑building.
• Track record of identifying critical issues, setting clear goals, and shaping the technical strategy for engineering organizations.
• Experience aligning engineering, product, design, and legal research around shared outcomes and coordinated execution.
• Clear communication skills with the ability to explain complex system designs to technical and non‑technical audiences.
• Experience guiding teams through architectural decisions, refactors, and long‑term platform modernization.
• Adaptable and comfortable working across varied technologies or domains, with a history of quickly gaining deep system understanding.
• Bonus experience with RAG pipelines, embeddings workflows, or large‑scale data systems.

Additional Experience That Would Be Valuable

• Experience designing or scaling data ingestion, transformation, or indexing pipelines, especially those supporting search or retrieval workloads.
• Familiarity with RAG‑oriented data workflows, including document processing, embeddings pipelines, and near‑real‑time indexing strategies.
• Background in building or operating data platforms handling large volumes of structured or unstructured data.
• Exposure to streaming infrastructure, distributed queues, or event‑driven architectures (e.g., Kafka).
• Experience evaluating and implementing distributed storage and retrieval systems such as Elasticsearch, Pinecone, DynamoDB, or similar.
• Prior work modernizing legacy systems or driving platform‑level architectural evolutions across multiple teams.

Technologies You Can Expect To Work With

These may evolve as our platform grows. Technologies currently in use include:

• Node.js, TypeScript, Python
• AWS, Terraform
• Kubernetes with ArgoCD, Docker
• GitHub, CircleCI
• Kafka

What We Offer You

• A meaningful leadership role shaping the platform foundation of a fast growing company
• A flexible hybrid environment with the option to work remotely most of the time
• Competitive salary and equity compensation
• A thoughtful benefits package that supports you and your family
• A team that values collaboration, kindness, high standards, and continuous learning
• A culture where quality, lean iteration, and thoughtful system design are core engineering principles
• An environment where your work directly accelerates innovation in a rapidly evolving market

The Core Values That Define Our Culture

• We are customer focused
• We put the team interest before self interest
• We are pleasant and playful
• We are open to better ideas
• We solve the toughest problems

What To Expect In The Interview Process

• Chat with our Talent Acquisition Manager
• Meet our VP of Engineering
• Technical deep dive with an engineering team member
• Leadership interview with our VP of Engineering
• Meet the team
• Final conversation with our CEO

We are committed to creating an inclusive candidate experience. Please let us know if you require any accommodations during the process.

We believe our strength is built on diversity of thought, and encourage candidates from all backgrounds and experiences to apply. We value inclusiveness and are an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate based on race, religion, colour, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status. We strive to create an inclusive and accessible hiring experience for all candidates. If you need any accommodations during the interview process, please let us know in your application. Our team is dedicated to providing the necessary support and making reasonable adjustments to ensure a smooth process for everyone.