Senior Software Engineer - Systems

Full-Time | Vancouver, BC (Hybrid) | Reports to Director of Engineering

About UrbanLogiq

UrbanLogiq is a Community Intelligence Platform that helps governments understand how decisions ripple across safety, mobility, equity, economics, and risk. Where most govtech companies go deep in a single domain, we integrate across domains into actionable decisions. Our platform serves city departments, regional agencies, state, provincial and national governments across North America with overseas expansion underway.

At our core is a Knowledge Graph built on a formal ontology that organizes diverse public data (crash records, transit patterns, zoning, demographics, infrastructure, weather, economics) into shared space, time, and contextual relationships. Governments trust us with their data because governance is built into the platform's architecture: provenance, lineage, auditability, and strict data classification are structural, not bolted on.

We are a venture-backed company with paying government clients across Canada and the US, strategic partnerships with global engineering firms, and a production platform that is actively proving our technical thesis. This is applied AI with real users making real decisions.

The Role

We are hiring a Senior Software Engineer to develop and extend the systems layer of our platform: data pipelines, storage, and query infrastructure. You will report to our Director of Engineering.

Our systems are what set us apart. They give our users the security and transparency they need to make use of our data solutions in a compliant manner. You will also build the sinew that connects UrbanLogiq to our partners - making sure data feeds in efficiently from source agencies and fans out to consumers in a timely manner - and work with data scientists and product developers to ensure their insights and visualizations integrate cleanly on top of the systems you build.

This is a senior individual contributor role with technical leadership responsibility: you will drive implementation plans, negotiate scope with the product team, and lead junior and intermediate developers through delivery.

What You Will Do

• Design, build, and extend our core data systems in Rust: ingestion pipelines, storage layers, and query infrastructure. Apache DataFusion plays a key part in our technology base
• Build partner-facing data integrations, ensuring data flows efficiently from source agencies into the platform and out to consumers in a timely manner.
• Develop technical requirements in collaboration with product designers and other stakeholders, and turn them into technical implementation plans you own through execution.
• Negotiate deadlines and requirements with the product team on an ongoing basis, ensuring deliverables are scoped so they both ship on time and meet key user needs.
• Be an advocate for the quality of the platform, engineering within our governance constraints - provenance, lineage, auditability - rather than around them.
• Work with data scientists and product developers to make sure their insights and visualizations integrate with the systems layer.
• Lead junior and intermediate developers in the implementation of new products and functionality, through code review, pairing, and architecture discussions.
  
  

Who This Role Is For

We want to be clear about what we are looking for so the right candidates can identify themselves.

You think in systems, not features. You care about throughput, correctness, and failure modes. You've built infrastructure that other engineers depend on, and you design for the data volumes of tomorrow, not just today.

You ship production Rust. You have strong, demonstrable expertise in Rust and you hold a high bar for the code you and your team produce.

You lead through delivery. You've mentored other engineers, driven implementation plans across a team, and held the line on scope so quality and deadlines both survive.

You communicate across boundaries. Requirements come from product designers, data scientists, and partners. You can translate between them and keep everyone aligned on what's being built and why.

Technical Requirements

Required

• Strong demonstrable expertise in Rust, producing high quality individual contributions to a shared production codebase.
• At least 5 years of professional software engineering experience, preferably including large-scale data scenarios.
• Experience building data-intensive systems: pipelines, storage engines, query layers, or similar infrastructure where volume, correctness, and performance all matter.
• Proven leadership in software engineering, with a knack for mentoring others.
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills and interpersonal skills. The ability to communicate effectively with a diverse group of people is essential to success in this role.
• Ability to complete a background check prior to employment. We work with government data.
  
  

Strongly Preferred

• Hands-on experience with Apache DataFusion, Arrow, or the surrounding columnar data ecosystem (Parquet, object-store-backed query engines).
• Experience integrating with external partners or data providers: APIs, feeds, schema negotiation, and the operational realities of other people's data.
• Experience with data governance, provenance tracking, or compliance-sensitive systems.
• Startup or small-team experience. We are a team of approximately 20. You will operate with significant autonomy.
  
  

Why UrbanLogiq

The systems layer is the differentiator. Our security, transparency, and governance guarantees are what win government contracts. You will own the infrastructure those guarantees rest on.

Small team, real influence. Every engineer's voice carries weight in architecture and product direction. Your technical decisions shape the platform, not just a corner of it.

Interesting problems at real scale. Cross-domain government data - geospatial, temporal, tabular, graph - flowing through governed pipelines into a Knowledge Graph. The engineering problems are genuinely hard and genuinely matter.

Real impact. The systems you build inform decisions about road safety, transit planning, natural disaster management, and community development. The work affects how governments serve millions of people.

Compensation And Benefits

• Base salary: $130,000 - $160,000 CAD, commensurate with experience
• Performance bonus eligibility
• Stock options with meaningful equity participation
• Hybrid work arrangement (Vancouver, BC)
• Extended health and dental benefits