Senior Backend Software Engineer, Top Hat
Interactive software for higher education
Be an early applicant
Interactive software for higher education
201-500 employees
Be an early applicant
201-500 employees
Company mission
To empower educators to engage students and unleash their potential.
Role
Who you are
- This role is designed for an engineer who is not only a master of their craft in Java and Spring Boot but also a dedicated mentor and a proactive problem-solver
- Expert Java Foundation: Extensive experience with Java and a deep understanding of core programming principles and best practices. Proven expertise in Spring Boot for building scalable microservices and experience managing data with MongoDB
- Enterprise Experience: A track record of working on enterprise-level software systems that require high reliability and performance
- Architectural Vision: Ability to design and implement forward-thinking architectures that balance short-term value with long-term sustainability
- Quality Focused: Strong commitment to delivering testable, observable, and maintainable code
Desirable
- High-Traffic Systems: Experience designing and maintaining systems that handle high volumes of traffic and parallel connections
- Open Source Passion: A demonstrated passion for contributing to or leveraging open-source technologies
- UI/UX Awareness: A keen eye for user interface improvements and the ability to contribute to frontend-related technical discussions
- Infrastructure & Cloud: Familiarity with cloud platforms (AWS/GCP) and containerization tools like Jenkins, Docker, or Kubernetes
What the job involves
- Top Hat is hiring for a Senior Backend Software Engineer on our Aktiv Platform team. This is a great opportunity to drive force behind the technical excellence of our ecosystem. You will operate with a high degree of autonomy, leading the delivery of complex features and ensuring the stability of our high-traffic systems
- Independent Implementation: Lead the full software development lifecycle for complex features, including implementation, comprehensive testing, and debugging of robust code
- Technical Leadership: Drive the technical delivery of projects, influencing architectural decisions and ensuring solutions are scalable, maintainable, and aligned with long-term business goals
- Mentorship & Guidance: Actively mentor junior and intermediate engineers, providing constructive feedback through code reviews and documentation to support their professional growth
- Operational Excellence: Proactively identify operational risks and control deficiencies. Drive discussions regarding system redundancy, disaster recovery, and service availability
- Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner closely with Frontend Engineers, Product Managers, and Designers to build cohesive, user-centric solutions
- Process Innovation: Identify opportunities for automation and suggest UI improvements to enhance the overall user experience and internal delivery efficiency
Our take
Top Hat is at the apex of two major trends in education: the digitisation of platforms for content and the rising costs of higher education for students. By digitising work largely created by professors, Top Hat has delivered engaging content at a lower cost for students across Canada and North America.
Where traditional publishers rely on analogue processes to provide high-quality but largely unengaging, uninteractive and expensive textbooks, Top Hat markets the platform to professors to publish their own interactive multimedia online textbooks. This gives them a cut and builds a holistic student experience on top of it.
The product has now had so much success that Top Hat’s strategy has evolved to include buying those conventional publishers of postsecondary course materials. This means the company can shift those high-quality materials into digital versions and make them available on a subscription basis.
Steph
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
12% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 8 rounds)
Feb 2021
$130m
SERIES E
Feb 2020
$55m
SERIES D
Total funding: $234.9m
Company benefits
- Professional learning and development for all role levels
- The latest and greatest technology to do your job
- An awesome and welcoming Toronto HQ
- Competitive benefits and health/lifestyle spending accounts
- A management team focused on performance, growth, engagement and connection
- Employee-led, exec sponsored employee resource groups
Company HQ
Bay-Cloverhill, Toronto, ON
Leadership
Maggie (Moylan) Leen
(CEO)Formerly VP of Marketing and Communications, Medical and Healthcare at Adtalem Global Education. Also spent 14 years at Pearson and 2 years at Community Advocates.
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