Lead Software Engineer – Cloud Architecture & DevOps

About Valital

Valital is an award-winning AI-powered adverse media monitoring solution. We help organizations stay ahead of unexpected financial and reputation risks and build confident business relationships. Our clients across the Americas and Europe value our ability to deliver real-time information with unmatchable accuracy. Valital partners on key R&D projects with IVADO, an artificial intelligence research and transfer institute.

What You’ll Do

As a Lead Software Engineer , you will work closely with the co-founder and CPO and collaborate with a passionate team of data scientists, engineers and developers. You will be exposed to advanced technologies and will have the opportunity to learn.

You will design and implement highly distributed, resilient, and cost-effective systems in the cloud. You’ll take the reins in architecting modern backend infrastructure, with a strong focus on horizontal scalability, fault tolerance, and operational efficiency using AWS-native tools and infrastructure as code.

This is more than just a coding role — we want someone who understands how to build for failure, how to automate everything, and how to ensure systems remain fast, reliable, and cost-effective at scale.

You'll drive best practices in DevOps, contribute to continuous delivery strategies, and ensure our systems can scale without sacrificing stability or budget. You’ll also collaborate with data science teams to help operationalize ML models using AWS SageMaker and production-ready MLOps workflows.

You will:

• Architect, build, and maintain distributed backend services with an emphasis on high availability, auto-scaling, and graceful degradation.
• Design systems that are resilient to failure, support multi-tenant environments, and remain observable at every layer.
• Lead the buildout and optimization of CI/CD pipelines to automate testing, deployments, and infrastructure provisioning.
• Collaborate with data scientists and ML engineers to deploy, monitor, and version models using SageMaker or similar platforms.
• Enforce best practices for monitoring, alerting, logging, and security in production environments.
• Make architectural decisions that balance performance, scalability, maintainability, and cost-efficiency.
• Mentor developers and collaborate cross-functionally to ensure technical alignment and velocity.
• Support efforts around web scraping, data extraction pipelines, and external data ingestion.
• Advocate for and implement “infrastructure as code” using Terraform or similar tools.
• Develop automated unit tests and work closely with QA to ensure integration and user acceptance testing are done efficiently.

• Ensure best practices in security, compliance, and data protection are followed across all infrastructure components.

• Produce technical documentation.

What Do You Bring

• A degree in computer science or software engineering or equivalent.

• 5+ years of professional software development, with at least 2 in a senior or lead capacity.
• Demonstrated experience in building large-scale, distributed systems in a cloud-native environment.
• Proven ability to design services that scale horizontally, recover from failures gracefully, and support high concurrency.
• Hands-on experience with DevOps tooling, cloud automation, and modern deployment practices.
• Ability to optimize for cloud cost-efficiency using architecture best practices like right-sizing, spot instances, caching strategies, and tiered storage.

An experience with the following is preferred:

• AWS Services: Lambda, EC2, DynamoDB, RDS, SageMaker, ECS/Fargate, CloudWatch, CodePipeline, EventBridge, Secrets Manager, SQS, SNS, GuardDuty.
• IaC Tools: Terraform (preferred), CloudFormation.
• CI/CD: Building and maintaining pipelines using GitHub Actions, AWS CodePipeline, or similar.
• Security & Governance: IAM, VPC design, Secrets Management, GuardDuty, least-privilege policies.
• Monitoring & Observability: CloudWatch, log aggregation, distributed tracing, custom metrics.
• Scrapy or other web scraping frameworks.
• Designing for multi-tenant SaaS platforms.

What Sets You Apart

• You treat infrastructure as a product, not just as code.
• You’ve built systems that not only work, but scale — and done so cost-effectively.
• You value simplicity, automation, and observability as much as performance and reliability.
• You know when to use managed services to reduce overhead, and when to dig in and build something custom.

Why You’ll Love Working With Us

We want to work with people who think outside the box, who are passionate about what they do and who believe that collaboration leads to better outcomes. You will enjoy:

• Autonomy and ownership over architectural decisions.
• Working with a modern, cloud-first tech stack.
• A collaborative, engineering-led culture that values quality over quantity.
• A real influence over technical direction, tooling, and deployment strategies.
• The chance to build infrastructure the right way — from the ground up, with scale in mind.

If this sounds like you, then let’s talk! Valital offers a culture of innovation, collaboration, and challenges.

While Valital offers a remote working environment, we believe face-to-face meetings are sometimes needed to boost efficiency and creativity. You can work from anywhere or from our office in downtown Montreal.

If you’re interested in being a significant contributor to the success of a growing AI company, apply on our website.