Senior Software Engineer
Forum Ventures · Ottawa
Company Description
askpolly transforms large-scale human conversation into actionable insights. By leveraging AI and patented statistical models to analyze organic social media data, askpolly provides near-instant, statistically valid insight into market reactions, election outcomes, and messaging strategy. We are moving beyond traditional polling to give teams an agentic interface that delivers actionable results in under two minutes - empowering data-driven decision-making at the speed of conversation.
Role Description
Weʼre looking for a Senior Software Engineer with 5 - 8 years of professional experience to help design, build, and scale the production systems behind askpollyʼs AI-powered insights platform. This is a full-time role based in Ottawa, ON, operating on a hybrid schedule (4 days per week in-office).
In this role, youʼll own core backend architecture while contributing full-stack when needed, collaborating closely with product and data science teammates. You will take ownership of complex features from problem definition through production delivery. You should thrive in an early-stage environment where requirements can be ambiguous, trade-offs matter, and shipping reliable, data-intensive software quickly is paramount.
What youʼll do
Architect & Build: Design, develop, and maintain scalable backend services, robust APIs, and agentic workflows.
Full-Stack Collaboration: Build and improve product experiences using modern web technologies, bridging complex backend data with intuitive interfaces.
AI & Data Scale: Work directly with LLM pipelines, agent orchestration, and statistical systems to process massive streams of organic data.
Drive Standards: Improve system reliability, performance, observability, and maintainability across our cloud infrastructure.
Collaborate & Lead: Work cross-functionally to clarify product requirements, evaluate technical trade-offs, and make pragmatic architecture decisions.
Leverage Modern Workflows: Thoughtfully utilize AI tools to accelerate development velocity, elevate code quality, and optimize internal loops.
Qualifications
Experience: 5–8 years of professional software engineering experience building production-grade software.
Core Stack: Strong backend development experience with languages such as Python, Ruby GO, Java or similar.
Workflow Orchestration: Experience building, scheduling, and monitoring pipelines using Astro / Apache Airflow, Langchain etc.
Distributed Systems: Practical understanding of distributed systems architecture, microservices, and message queues/event streaming (e.g., Celery, Redis, RabbitMQ, or Kafka).
System Design: Strong foundation in computer science fundamentals, software architecture, performance optimization, and scalable data-intensive systems.
Nice to have:
Education: Degree in Computer Science, a related technical field, or equivalent deep practical experience.
Frontend Familiarity: Experience with React and TypeScript is highly valued.
Data & Databases: Hands-on experience working with document databases (e.g., MongoDB) and handling analytical data formats like Parquet.
Cloud Infrastructure: Familiarity with deploying and monitoring applications in cloud environments (Azure preferred)
Ideal Candidate
Comfort with ambiguity: You can take a vague “this workflow is painful” and turn it into a concrete diagnosis, a clear path forward, and working software.
Strong ownership: You proactively identify what needs doing, drive solutions forward, and close loops without waiting for every detail to be defined.
Bias for shipping: You make pragmatic decisions, balance quality with speed, and know when to iterate.
Strategic mindset: You understand the “why” behind your work and can explain technical trade-offs to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
Deep curiosity: You read the docs, ask good questions, and learn new domains because you want to understand how things work—not just what you need to ship.
AI-first mindset: You actively use AI tools to improve your development workflow and are excited to keep experimenting with new ways to build software.
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