Staff Developer - Ad Tech

Come make your difference in communities across Canada, where authenticity, trust and making connections is valued – as we shape the future of Canadian retail, together. Our unique position as one of the country's largest employers, coupled with our commitment to positively impact the lives of all Canadians, provides our colleagues a range of opportunities and experiences to help Canadians Live Life Well®.

At Loblaw Companies Limited, we succeed through collaboration and commitment and set a high bar for ourselves and those around us. Whether you are just starting your career, re-entering the workforce, or looking for a new job, this is where you belong. 

We are seeking a Staff Developer to lead the technical strategy and system architecture of our Advertising Technology platform, which includes core backend services, machine learning systems, and audience management systems. In this role, you will work cross-functionally across multiple teams to drive technical direction, ensure operational excellence, and scale our systems to meet the growing demands of the business. As a Staff Engineer, you will serve as a force multiplier—raising the bar for engineering standards, mentoring senior engineers, and ensuring our advertising systems are resilient, high-performing, and future-ready.

What You'll Do:

• Lead the design of orchestration logic and control flows that coordinate audience targeting, campaign management, ads optimization strategies, and omni-channel activation, ensuring cohesive execution across diverse ad systems.

• Architect, build, and optimize scalable data and service infrastructure using technologies such as Java, Python, GCP (including Vertex AI, BigQuery, BigTable, Pub/Sub, and Dataflow), Kubernetes, and Airflow

• Develop and operationalize machine learning powered services that improve advertising effectiveness and automation, in close collaboration with ML and platform teams.

• Drive the evolution of the Audience Hub platform to ensure it can flexibly support a wide range of business use cases — including the creation, segmentation, and activation of new audience types — while maintaining performance, scalability, and privacy compliance.

• Champion engineering excellence by promoting best practices in code quality, observability, testability, CI/CD, and operational resilience.

• Collaborate closely with Engineering Managers, Engineers, and Product to translate complex business goals into robust, scalable systems.

• Mentor engineers across teams, guiding architectural decisions, enabling technical growth, and fostering a high-trust, collaborative engineering culture.

• Identify and drive platform improvements, addressing system bottlenecks and tech debt to ensure long-term scalability and velocity.

• Collaborate with product and technical stakeholders to align system capabilities with evolving business goals and platform strategies.

Does This Sound Like You?

• 8+ years of software engineering experience, with a focus on building distributed backend systems, data infrastructure, or machine learning platforms in high-scale environments.

• Proven experience with Java programming language

• Proven track record of leading architecture and development of robust, scalable backend services and orchestration layers in cloud-native environments.

• Extensive experience with cloud platforms (GCP preferred), including tools such as Vertex AI, BigQuery, BigTable, Pub/Sub, Dataflow, and Airflow or equivalent technologies on AWS or Azure.

• Deep expertise in event-driven and distributed systems architecture, with experience designing real-time ad orchestration pipelines and coordinating components via Pub/Sub, or equivalent messaging systems.

• Strong background in system observability and operational excellence, including expertise in monitoring, tracing, alerting, and incident response using tools like Prometheus, Grafana, Stackdriver, or equivalents.

• Able to think strategically and influence decisions beyond your immediate team.

• You excel at knowledge transfer, both inbound and outbound. You know what questions to ask when drilling down into unfamiliar technology. You can translate the implications of high-level constraints and decisions stakeholders verbally and in writing. 

• You are comfortable making decisions in the face of ambiguity. Your technology choices, designs, and architectures use as much data as is practical from a variety of sources. 

• Passionate about mentorship, knowledge sharing, and fostering an inclusive, high-performing technical culture.

Our commitment to Sustainability and Social Impact is an essential part of the way we do business, and we focus our attention on areas where we can have the greatest impact. Our approach to sustainability and social impact is based on three pillars – Environment, Sourcing and Community – and we are constantly looking for ways to demonstrate leadership in these important areas. Our CORE Values – Care, Ownership, Respect and Excellence – guide all our decision-making and come to life through our Blue Culture. We offer our colleagues progressive careers, comprehensive training, flexibility, and other competitive benefits – these are some of the many reasons why we are one of Canada’s Top Employers, Canada’s Best Diversity Employers, Canada’s Greenest Employers & Canada’s Top Employers for Young People.

If you are unsure whether your experience matches every requirement above, we encourage you to apply anyway. We are looking for varied perspectives which include diverse experiences that we can add to our team.

We have a long-standing focus on diversity, equity and inclusion because we know it will make our company a better place to work and shop. We are committed to creating accessible environments for our colleagues, candidates and customers. Requests for accommodation due to a disability (which may be visible or invisible, temporary or permanent) can be made at any stage of application and employment. We encourage candidates to make their accommodation needs known so that we can provide equitable opportunities.  
 
Please Note:
Candidates who are 18 years or older are required to complete a criminal background check. Details will be provided through the application process.

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