Senior Platform & Infrastructure Software Engineer

Position/Title: Senior Platform & Infrastructure Software Engineer

Type: Regular/full-time

Location: 650 W Georgia St #1410, Vancouver, BC V6B 0S6

Work Setup: In-office, hybrid or a possibility of remote work opportunity

Hours of Work: 9 am - 5 pm PST/PDT

Salary Range: $103,000 - $147,000 Annual

Closing Date: April 3, 2026

Existing Vacancy: Yes

OUR COMPANY

As the first and fastest-growing Canadian insurtech, software is at the heart of who we are. We recognize the transformative power of technology—especially when applied to a traditionally conservative industry—and use it to scale our business, improve operational efficiency, and make it easier for customers to interact with us.

Square One operates a fully custom software platform that supports customer-facing digital products, internal operations, and a nationwide contact center. As our business continues to grow across Canada, we are investing more deeply in the platforms, automation, and operational systems that support our engineering team and production environments.

YOUR ROLE

As a Software Engineer – Platform & Infrastructure, your primary responsibility will be to design, build, and maintain the internal systems that support our local development, testing, and production environments.

This role focuses on infrastructure-as-code, CI/CD pipelines, environment automation, database workflows, observability, and operational reliability. You will work closely with application developers to ensure that platform systems are reliable, repeatable, cost-effective, and easy to work with.

While platform and infrastructure work will be your primary area of responsibility, you will also contribute to application-level development as needed. This role is ideal for an experienced software engineer who enjoys working across the boundary between application code and infrastructure, and who can make thoughtful tradeoffs around performance, cost, complexity, and long-term maintainability.

YOUR RESPONSIBILITIES

Your responsibilities will be aligned with your experience and interests, and may include:

Platform, Infrastructure & Operations

• Designing and maintaining local development environments using Docker.
• Building and managing test environments, including automated provisioning, teardown, and data refresh workflows.
• Supporting and improving production environments, with a focus on reliability, safety, and repeatability.
• Designing and maintaining CI/CD pipelines using AWS-native tooling (CodePipeline, CodeBuild, CodeDeploy) and GitHub Actions.
• Building and managing infrastructure-as-code using AWS CDK (TypeScript) and CloudFormation.
• Creating and maintaining EC2 AMIs using EC2 Image Builder.
• Managing and improving background processing systems, including cron jobs, workers, queues, and scheduled tasks.
• Designing and maintaining database snapshot, restore, and data sanitization workflows.
• Making informed cost, performance, and complexity tradeoffs across infrastructure and application systems.
• Implementing and maintaining observability across environments, including:
• CloudWatch logs, metrics, and alarms
• AWS budget alerts and cost constraints
• Fault and error signals from RDS, EC2, and OS-level services
• Application- and process-level signals (PHP, Apache, background workers)
• Improving operational visibility, alert quality, and failure recovery.

Application Development

• Contributing to backend development using PHP and MySQL, with a focus on infrastructure- and operations-adjacent application features, such as:
• Identifying and addressing application behavior that places unnecessary load on shared systems (e.g., excessive database usage, inefficient batch processing).
• Converting large, long-running, or fragile cron-based jobs into more reliable, observable, centralized queue / worker-based systems.
• Improving the operational characteristics of application code, including execution time, fault tolerance, and deployability.
• Supporting tooling and integration work where application and infrastructure concerns intersect.
• Collaborating with application developers to evolve patterns that improve reliability, scalability, and operational clarity.
• Participating in code reviews and architectural discussions with a platform and systems perspective.

You won’t be pigeonholed at Square One. While this role has a clear platform focus, we value engineers who are comfortable working across domains and contributing where they can have the most impact.

ON-CALL RESPONSIBILITIES

• This role may be part of a rotating on-call schedule shared across the engineering team.
• On-call responsibilities focus on responding to production incidents and system alerts, not routine operational work.
• We aim to keep on-call low-volume and sustainable through strong automation, observability, and well-defined runbooks.
• When on-call, you will work closely with other engineers to diagnose issues, mitigate impact, and help drive long-term improvements to prevent recurrence.
• A key expectation of this role is to document systems, workflows, and operational procedures so that on-call responsibilities and recovery processes are transparent, repeatable, and shared across the team.

OUR TECHNOLOGY STACK

Core Application Stack

• Backend: PHP, MySQL
• Frontend: Vue.js, Ionic (web, iOS, Android)
• Local Development: Docker
• Scripting & Tooling: Bash, Node.js, TypeScript

Cloud Platform

• AWS Infrastructure: EC2, RDS, S3, VPC, Route 53
• Infrastructure as Code: AWS CDK and CloudFormation
• CI/CD: GitHub, AWS CodePipeline
• Event & Workflow Systems: EventBridge, Step Functions, Lambda

Observability & Operations

• Monitoring, logging, and alerting through Amazon CloudWatch
• Cost monitoring and operational alerts using AWS-native tooling

Customer Operations Platform

• Amazon Connect powers our nationwide contact center and event-driven integrations.

YOUR QUALIFICATIONS

Must-haves

• Strong experience building and maintaining production-grade software systems.
• Experience with AWS CDK or other infrastructure-as-code tools.
• Strong Docker experience for local development and environment management.
• Experience working with AWS infrastructure in production environments.
• Experience designing or maintaining CI/CD pipelines.
• Strong Bash/shell scripting skills.
• Strong Linux/Unix fundamentals.
• Strong JavaScript / Node.js experience.
• Experience working with TypeScript
• Advanced experience with PHP (8.4).
• Strong SQL and relational database experience (ideally MySQL).

Nice-to-haves

• Experience with EC2 Image Builder or AMI-based workflows.
• Experience with Apache (mod_php), PHP-FPM, and/or Nginx.
• Experience with observability, alerting, and operational monitoring.
• Prior experience in insurance or financial services.
• Experience with test automation

WHO YOU ARE

Additionally, to be successful as a Senior Platform & Infrastructure Software Engineer at Square One, the following should describe you:

• Articulate and able to communicate complex technical ideas to both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Detail-oriented and thoughtful about edge cases, failure modes, and long-term maintainability.
• Proactive and comfortable taking ownership of ambiguous or cross-cutting problems.
• Comfortable working across application code, infrastructure, and operational concerns.
• Enjoys solving problems where correctness, reliability, and simplicity matter.

COMPENSATION

You appreciate the fact that Square One personalizes your compensation and benefits in the same way it personalizes policies for its customers. Your very competitive compensation and benefits plan includes:

• A base salary range of $103,000 - $147,000 per year.
• 3 weeks, not 2 weeks, of vacation to start, and an additional week after only 3 years.
• The ability to work from home.
• Flexible medical, dental, vision and extended health care coverage.
• Short and long-term disability coverage.
• Participation in the corporate profit-sharing plan.
• We go out for dinner regularly, on the company’s dime, to celebrate our successes.

ACCESSIBILITY

Square One welcomes and encourages applications from people with disabilities. Accommodations are available on request for candidates taking part in all aspects of the selection process. Learn more about our commitment to accessibility: https://www.squareone.ca/accessibility.

WHY WORK FOR SQUARE ONE?

Probably the shortest and simplest answer for why you should work at Square One is that you want to be part of a tight-knit team where each person's expertise is respected and valued. You're done working at places that tell you what to do, how to do it, and that don't compensate you fairly. To learn more about why you should work for Square One, visit: www.squareone.ca/careers

HOW TO APPLY

Please upload your resume in PDF format. Your resume should clearly indicate how you meet the qualifications. You have our commitment that we will respond to all applicants and inquiries.

Job Type: Full-time

Pay: $103,000.00-$147,000.00 per year

Benefits

• Casual dress
• Company events
• Dental care
• Disability insurance
• Employee assistance program
• Extended health care
• Life insurance
• On-site gym
• Paid time off
• Profit sharing
• Vision care
• Work from home

Application question(s):

• Are you legally entitled to work in Canada for any employer?
• Why did you start coding?
• This role can be in-person, remote, or hybrid. Which one is your preference?
• Square One is based in Vancouver,, BC. Are you able to work 8 hours per day that overlap with our core hours, 10 am – 3 pm PST/PDT, Monday to Friday?

Education

• Bachelor's Degree (preferred)

Experience

• insurance industry: 1 year (preferred)
• Bash/shell scripting: 2 years (required)
• JavaScript / Node.js/Typescript: 2 years (required)
• PHP coding: 2 years (required)
• SQL coding (ideally MySQL): 3 years (required)
• AWS CDK or other infrastructure-as-code tools: 3 years (required)
• Docker (