Principal Software Engineer

Questrade is on a mission to help Canadians to become much more financially successful and secure.

For nearly 30 years, Questrade Financial Group has been delivering on that mission through investing, banking, mortgages, and real estate. Together, we tilt finance in favour of ambitious Canadians, creating new ways for them to seize the financial future they deserve.

We're looking for people who are ready to enter their career inflection point. Mission-driven, exceptional folks that never settle. The work here is hard because the responsibility is real. If that's the standard you've been looking for, keep reading.

Req 4235

The return on your career investment

• Compensation and incentives built to reward the value you bring.
• RRSP matching of up to 6%.
• Health and wellness resources and programs, including $5,000 in mental health practitioner coverage.
• $5,000 in tuition subsidies for job-related courses, every year.
• 100% parental top-up, up to 26 weeks for birthing parents and 18 weeks for non-birthing parents.
• A hybrid environment, with at least three days in the office built for working together.
• Paid vacation, personal, and sick days.
• A community care day to give back to the causes you care about.

This job posting is for an existing vacancy 

We’re looking for our next Principal Software Engineer, Money Movement.

QuestBank is connecting directly to Canada’s core payment rails and building the platform that moves money across the Quest ecosystem and across borders. The Principal / Senior Software Engineer, Backend owns the engineering behind that platform: Real-Time Rail, Interac e-Transfer, ACSS, Lynx, Bill Payments, internal transfers, and international corridors.

This is also one of the first engineering roles at the Bank designed around an AI-driven SDLC. You lead a squad of AI agents covering architecture, development, QA, and tech lead functions, and you are the accountable engineer for everything they ship. You will define how this way of working operates here rather than inherit someone else’s process, and you will ship national payments infrastructure at a pace conventional teams cannot match. The role suits a technical leader who wants scope, ownership, and problems where correctness genuinely matters.

The mandate

In this role, you will:

• Set the operating model, task decomposition, context standards, and review gates for a squad of AI agents. Arbitrate conflicting outputs and hold the line on anything touching customer funds. You are the single accountable human for correctness, security, and production readiness.
• Define service boundaries, data models, messaging patterns, idempotency, and failure recovery for the money movement platform. Write the specification and acceptance criteria before code generation, and make the calls that cannot be delegated.
• Deliver integrations across RTR, Interac e-Transfer, ACSS, Lynx, EFT and PADs, Bill Payments, and internal money movement. Own ISO 20022 messaging, clearing windows and cut-offs, exception and return handling, and cross-entity settlement.
• Deliver cross-border capability including SWIFT correspondent messaging, wire initiation and repair, multi-currency ledgering and FX settlement, nostro and vostro reconciliation, and sanctions screening. Design for partner substitution rather than coupling to a single provider.
• Engineer for 24/7/365 availability on real-time rails. Own SLOs, observability, end-to-end traceability, disaster recovery, and the automated test strategy the QA agent executes. Lead technical incident resolution
• Embed velocity limits, duplicate protection, AML triggers, audit trails, and data protection in the service layer. Produce the evidence risk, audit, and regulators require, and treat OSFI B-13, E-21, and B-10 and Payments Canada rules as design inputs rather than late-stage checks.
• Work directly with product, operations, risk, treasury, and fraud partners, co-designing in the open rather than trading documents across a boundary. Agentic delivery surfaces requirement and control gaps faster than any handoff cycle absorbs them. Review human and agent-authored code, and raise the ceiling on what the squad can safely delegate

You’re ready for this mandate if you have the following qualifications

• Fluent reasoning about payment rails, settlement finality, clearing windows, message standards, funds availability, returns and reversals, and reconciliation. Demonstrated end-to-end delivery on at least one rail in production. Recognizes when a generated design is technically valid but wrong for the rail, and defends that judgment to product, operations, and risk
• 5+ years of backend engineering with production ownership of high-volume transactional systems, including time as a tech lead, squad lead, or equivalent scope of technical accountability
• Expert backend fundamentals that transfer across stacks: concurrency, transaction and state management, performance profiling, and the ability to read, critique, and correct unfamiliar code fast. In an agentic workflow the differentiator is judgment about generated code, not fluency in one language. Experience with C# and modern .NET is a nice to have, as the current estate is predominantly .NET, but strong Java, Go, or Kotlin backgrounds will not be screened out.
• Production delivery using agentic coding tools, ideally Claude CLI. Working knowledge of context and specification design, MCP-based tool integration, agent evaluation, and human review controls.
• Deep grasp of idempotency, exactly-once and at-least-once semantics, event-driven architecture, sagas and compensating transactions, and consistency tradeoffs.
• Hands-on with Google Cloud and GKE, containers, Pub/Sub, infrastructure as code, CI/CD, and distributed tracing. Equivalent depth on another major cloud with a willingness to ramp is acceptable.
• Strong REST and OpenAPI design, event contracts, and versioning. Solid relational database engineering with transaction isolation, schema evolution, and ledger and multi-currency concepts.
• Pulls the right people into a problem early, shares working artifacts before they are polished, and builds shared understanding of AI-driven delivery with teams that have not yet adopted it.
• Treats agent output as their own work product and never ships what they cannot explain or defend. Pragmatic about pace in a regulated environment without using regulation as an excuse for slow delivery.

Nice to have

• Have experience n the financial services industry
  
  

The final compensation package will be commensurate with the successful candidate's experience, skills, and geographic location (Canada). It includes a comprehensive benefits plan and a competitive incentive (bonus) program for Full-Time Permanent roles.

Base salary range

$150,000 - $190,000 CAD

Technology and AI

We mix human ingenuity with advanced technology. For ambitious builders like you, we provide the latest technology to enable your creativity. You'll have everything you need to build the best outcomes and products for our clients.

Diversity and Inclusion

At Questrade Financial Group of Companies, we’re committed to fostering a diverse, inclusive, and accessible work environment where individuals are treated with dignity and respect. Our global team reflects the diversity of the communities we serve and operate in.

Accessibility statement

Candidates selected for an interview are contacted directly. If you require accommodation during the recruitment or selection process, please let us know. We will work with you to meet your needs.

AI in hiring

Questrade Financial Group of companies Applicant Tracking System uses artificial intelligence (AI) for application screening. The AI system operates on predetermined criteria, with final decisions subject to human review.