Staff Software Engineer

Location: Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

Department: Engineering

The Team You’ll Work With

You’ll enter our engineering interview process as part of a pooled hiring model. We believe in hiring for Carta first, focusing on your core strengths and technical craft rather than a specific team’s immediate gap. 

Staff Engineers at Carta are technical anchors for our business. You don’t just own features, you take long-term accountability for the technical health and strategic direction of different domains. As you move through our process, we’ll transition from the general pool to a team-matching phase. Our goal is to match your unique technical strengths, and personal career interests with our most impactful, strategic challenges. 

Strategic areas you may influence include:

• Platform Data Ecosystem: Shaping how data flows across our entire suite of products to ensure a "single source of truth" for private market data.
• Financial Systems Architecture: Designing resilient, scalable solutions for management fee accounting and multi-currency transactions.
• Engineering Excellence: Defining company-wide standards that reduce operational load and improve developer velocity across dozens of teams.

The Problems You’ll Solve

As a Staff Engineer, you are responsible for the long-term technical health and success of your business unit. You’ll work to:

• Navigate Ambiguity: Tackle the most complex and poorly defined problems at Carta, breaking them down into navigable paths for the rest of the organization.
• Champion Systemic Improvement: Identify and eliminate failure patterns across multiple systems, driving architectural changes that improve scalability and reliability.
• Bridge Technical Gaps: Use your deep understanding of cross-functional domains to align multiple teams on major technical decisions.
• Define the AI Frontier: Lead the charge in transforming how we build by defining the context and building the rails that allow every person at Carta to leverage AI tools safely and effectively. You’ll help move the organization toward a future where AI amplifies our collective engineering impact.
• Uphold Engineering Standards: Set the vision for operational excellence and mentor senior engineers to raise the collective craft of the organization.

About You

• The Tech Stack: You are an expert in building distributed systems. While our primary stack is Python/Django, React, and Postgres, you should be comfortable guiding technical direction across JVM languages, gRPC, and cloud-native infrastructure (AWS). 
• Leadership: You lead through influence rather than authority, acting as a role model for constructive communication and technical discipline.
• Vision: You don't just solve the problem in front of you; you anticipate future roadblocks and build systems that support long-term business growth.
• Experience: We recommend 10+ years of professional software engineering experience with a track record of high-level technical leadership.

Salary

Carta’s compensation package includes a market competitive salary, equity for all full time roles, exceptional benefits, and, for applicable roles, commissions plans. Our expected cash compensation (salary + commission if applicable) range for this role is: 

•  $205,600 - $257,000 CAD in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

We are hiring for multiple levels and locations, so final offers may vary from the amounts listed based on geography, experience and expertise, and other factors.