SENIOR BACKEND DEVELOPER

What is Watoga?

Watoga provides cutting edge technology-enabled services to optimize mining operations, reduce waste, and increase profitability. Our first step is the drill and blast process, which means understanding what’s in the rock and how to blast it efficiently.

Everything around us starts as ore in the ground. Valuable ore is rare, but the time constraints of mining and the lack of information about the subsurface causes modern mines to send tons of ore to waste and leave billions of dollars on the table.

Although the mining industry is worth $2.4 trillion, a lot of mining operations still operate with old technology and outdated practices. It is our mission to maximize the use of existing data and enrich it with better instrumentalization to build a future in which fully autonomous mining is a reality, where the earth’s resources are used to their fullest extent. This is just the beginning. Learn more.

Responsibilities

• Architect, implement, and maintain backend services and data pipelines with a focus on scalability and fault tolerance.
• Deal with and clean up operational data from sensors and mining equipment to feed into our models.
• Design and optimize relational database schemas, queries, and indexes using PostgreSQL.
• Develop and tune geospatial queries for advanced location-based use cases.
• Work with cloud-native infrastructure, primarily Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
• Collaborate with frontend, DevOps, and product teams to deliver robust APIs and high-performance systems.
• Build monitoring, testing, and deployment pipelines to support a rapid development cycle with IaC (Terraform).
• Mentor junior developers and contribute to technical roadmap discussions.

Qualifications

• Considerable experience in backend software engineering, with a proven track record of building large-scale, production-grade systems.
• Strong expertise with PostgreSQL (query optimization, schema design, performance tuning).
• Experience with geospatial databases/queries (PostGIS or similar).
• Professional experience with GCP and/or AWS services for backend and data engineering workloads.
• Solid programming skills in at least one of: Python (FastAPI), C++, Rust or Node.js.
• Familiarity with distributed systems, messaging queues, and stream processing.
• Strong grasp of CI/CD pipelines, containerization (Docker, Kubernetes), and infrastructure-as-code.
• Excellent problem-solving skills and ability to work independently as well as in cross-functional teams.

In this role, you will

• Own a product vertical with the opportunity to build a team around yourself over time.
• Work directly with our internal and external customers to drive our roadmap.
• Get to build alongside the best engineers and mining operators in the world.
• Be given autonomy and virtually unlimited room to grow.
• Travel all over the world.

This might be a good fit if you

• Experience with data lake architectures and ETL/ELT workflows.
• Exposure to machine learning data pipelines.
• Experience working in the mining sector.
• Knowledge of microservice design patterns.
• Familiarity with Terraform or similar tools.
• Have a bias to action, take pride in your work, and care more about getting to the right solution than being right.
• Have led critical projects or initiatives.
• Have extensive experience shipping modern, full-stack software.
• Are product-minded and user-driven.
• Have a strong first-principled way of thinking.
• Are excited to work in a fast-paced environment with high stakes and quick iteration cycles.
• Are a previous or future founder — if you leave Watoga to start a company, we’ll do everything to support you, including investing in you and introducing you to Watoga’s investors.
• Can work from our Montreal headquarters.

Compensation

This role will pay $100,000–$150,000, plus significant equity, so you have a real stake in Watoga’s success. We are all in this journey together.