Job Specifications
About Blue J
Blue J builds the most advanced tax research technology in the world. Our customers are tax professionals who rely on us to deliver fast, accurate insights that help them serve their clients with confidence. Since launching our flagship generative AI product, we have consistently exceeded revenue targets and are scaling rapidly into new product areas and markets.
Our engineering team is known for building high quality systems, moving fast through lean practices, and shipping multiple times per day with confidence. We value thoughtful system design, strong software fundamentals, and a culture of collaboration and continuous learning.
We recently raised a significant funding round to accelerate product and platform development, and we are expanding our engineering leadership team to support this growth.
A Note on Location
This is a remote role requiring candidates to be within driving distance of Toronto for in person meetings 1 to 2 times per quarter. All candidates must be eligible to work in Canada.
About The Role
We are looking for a Director of Engineering that will guide the evolution of Blue J’s platform architecture and help our engineering teams deliver high quality products at speed. This role is ideal for someone who is a strong system designer, deeply experienced with SaaS platforms, and energized by helping teams navigate technical complexity.
You will work closely with product, engineering, and research to define platform direction, build reliable and scalable systems, and ensure our teams have the tools and infrastructure they need to ship confidently and frequently. This leader will coach senior engineers, help untangle difficult architectural challenges, jump into code and designs when needed, and grow a platform team made up of strong SDII and senior engineers.
What You Will Be Doing
Setting Direction
Collaborating with product and engineering leaders to define platform goals and priorities
Owning the long term vision for platform capabilities that support reliability, scalability, developer experience, and speed of delivery
Identifying focus areas to improve architecture, infrastructure, system performance, and cross team technical alignment
Enabling High Quality Delivery
Leading platform engineers to design and build foundational systems and internal tools
Going deep into architecture and designs to guide teams through ambiguity and complexity
Helping engineers make architectural tradeoffs that balance speed with long term maintainability
Ensuring projects stay on track and are communicated clearly to stakeholders
Supporting teams in shipping frequently, safely, and with high confidence, consistent with Blue J’s engineering culture
Strengthening the Engineering Organization
Coaching and developing engineers into strong system thinkers and leaders
Improving engineering practices that support quality, lean iteration, strong testing, and healthy system design
Hiring high performing engineers who raise the bar
Creating clarity around ownership, mandates, interfaces, and platform boundaries across pods
What You Offer Blue J
10+ years of hands-on experience designing and building distributed backend systems, including service-oriented and event-driven architectures.
5+ years leading software engineering or data platform teams with demonstrated success growing and developing high-performing groups.
Strong architectural foundation with experience owning complex systems end-to-end; including roadmap creation, system design, implementation, and long-term evolution.
Experience with data ingestion, transformation, and indexing pipelines, ideally involving streaming architectures or retrieval workflows.
Ability to design and reason about scalable distributed systems, including performance, reliability, consistency, and cost tradeoffs.
Demonstrated ability to operate as a senior/staff-level IC when needed, especially during early context-building.
Track record of identifying critical issues, setting clear goals, and shaping the technical strategy for engineering organizations.
Experience aligning engineering, product, design, and legal research around shared outcomes and coordinated execution.
Clear communication skills with the ability to explain complex system designs to technical and non-technical audiences.
Experience guiding teams through architectural decisions, refactors, and long-term platform modernization.
Adaptable and comfortable working across varied technologies or domains, with a history of quickly gaining deep system understanding.
Bonus experience with RAG pipelines, embeddings workflows, or large-scale data systems.
Additional Experience That Would Be Valuable
Experience designing or scaling data ingestion, transformation, or indexing pipelines, especially those supporting search or retrieval workloads.
Familiarity with RAG-oriented data workflows, including document processing, embeddings pipelines, and near-real-time indexing strategies.
Background in
About the Company
Founded in 2015, Blue J is the leading generative AI solution for tax research. Trusted by firms of all sizes, Blue J delivers fast, verifiable answers to complex tax questions, empowering professionals to provide exceptional client service. With its conversational interface and curated library of authoritative sources, Blue J is transforming how tax experts work.
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