Staff Software Engineer, Data Systems

At Hive, we’re all about creating moments that matter and helping event marketers connect with their biggest fans. Our platform powers marketing for 1,500+ iconic events, festivals, venues, and promoters across North America. We help them grow their customer base and sell out shows using intelligent, automated, and personalized digital marketing tools.

Hive integrates with 25+ platforms (like Ticketmaster and Shopify) to provide rich customer data in real-time, enabling event marketers to engage their audiences with precision and impact.

What Data at Hive looks like:

Hive’s R&D Data Pod is responsible for how we store and query production data at scale. Our team isn’t focused on BI or dashboards — we build the systems that power Hive’s products and make data accessible, reliable, and performant.

As a Staff Engineer, you’ll play a key role in evolving this infrastructure: scaling our production datastores, enabling predictable query performance across hundreds of millions of records, and moving the platform toward real-time, event-driven data flows. You’ll partner with other engineering teams to ensure Hive’s data foundations support both today’s products and tomorrow’s growth.

What you’ll get up to:

• Scale core datastores: Lead the growth and optimization of MySQL, MongoDB, and ClickHouse to handle production workloads reliably and efficiently.

• Migrate with confidence: Design and execute safe migrations between datastores and schemas with minimal disruption.

• Deliver predictable performance: Extend Hive’s query systems to ensure reliable query execution across hundreds of millions of data points.

• Advance event-driven architecture: Enable user and segment updates to flow in real time by championing event-driven patterns (e.g., change-data capture, streaming).

• Enable Hive’s data model: Help define schemas and norms that enable teams to capture and use data correctly at the source.

• Enable engineers across Hive: Build infrastructure and tooling that empowers application engineers to work with data effectively, without reinventing solutions.

• Lead with expertise: Act as the domain authority on data systems, mentor engineers, and set technical direction for how Hive captures, stores, and uses data.

• Continuously improve: Proactively identify and implement improvements to Hive’s data stack, keeping it modern, scalable, and resilient.

The tech stack you’ll be working with:

• Python Application Code

• Datastores: MySQL, MongoDB, Clickhouse, Elasticsearch

What you have:

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with 5+ years focused on data systems (databases, pipelines, infrastructure).

• Experience working with very large-scale datasets (hundreds of millions to billions of rows).

• Strong SQL skills and experience designing schemas and optimizing queries in large-scale relational and analytical databases (MySQL, ClickHouse, MongoDB).

• Proficiency in Python for building production-grade systems, including data pipelines, backend services, and orchestration frameworks (e.g. Celery or similar).

• Experience scaling production datastores and managing safe, low-disruption data migrations.

• Familiarity with event-driven and real-time data architectures (e.g. CDC, streaming).

• Understanding of data quality, governance, and compliance principles in production systems.

• Strong technical leadership and communication skills, enabling cross-team collaboration and mentoring.

Who you are:

• Comfortable operating independently and making progress in ambiguous, fast-changing environments.

• Bias toward impact: willing to make decisions with imperfect information and iterate quickly, often liaising and working with other teams inside product and engineering.

• Skilled at troubleshooting complex systems and building durable solutions when things break.

• Excited to shape the future of Hive’s data infrastructure and team in a high-growth, fast-paced company.

Nice to haves:

• Familiarity with AWS data infrastructure (RDS, S3, Kinesis, Redshift, etc.) and cloud-native scaling.

• Experience introducing or migrating to event-driven architectures (Kafka, Debezium, CDC).

• History of owning or re-architecting a data platform end-to-end in a fast-growing environment.

• Background in SaaS or event-driven products where data systems directly power user-facing features.

Compensation/Benefits Package

• Meaningful salary and equity: you're rewarded based on impact.

  • The compensation range for this role is $180,000 to $225,000 CAD per year, depending on qualifications and experience. This compensation range takes into account a wide range of factors that are considered in making compensation decisions including but not limited to job-related skills, experience and relevant training, and business and organizational needs. New team members typically start between $180,000- $202,500, based on experience and alignment with the expectations outlined in this posting. This range reflects not just where you begin, but the growth we expect and invest in as you grow at Hive.

• Work fully remote from the comfort of your home.

• Flexible work hours: minimal meetings and no 9-5

• Health & Dental coverage with Parental Leave top-ups in addition to EI benefits

• Unlimited vacation/PTO: so you can be happy and healthy!

About Hive.co

Hive.co is a marketing platform for event marketers. We help brands personalize and automate their campaigns, using email and SMS, to empower them to sell out so they can focus on making their events unforgettable.

By integrating with ticketing partners like Ticketmaster and e-commerce partners like Shopify, we enable brands to access and act on all their customer data, so they can easily segment their list in thousands of ways, and send more customized, timely email campaigns that land in inboxes.

We started our company inside a University of Waterloo computer lab in early 2014, graduated from Y Combinator that summer (S14 batch) and have been growing ever since. Originally based in Kitchener, our team is now 100% remote and located all across Canada! We strive to provide an online work environment that allows team members to have a strong work life balance while still feeling connected to their team and Hive’s mission.

To learn more about our team check out our About Us page on our website: https://www.hive.co/about