Software Engineer / Developer
Builds and runs the product. At senior and staff level, also decides how it is built and raises everyone else's output.
Who to hire
The shape of person who does this job well — and whether you should be hiring it at all yet.
Scaling companies hire this role mostly at senior and staff level, and that is a deliberate shape: few, expensive, experienced engineers rather than many junior ones. It is the right shape for a startup too. Your first two engineering hires set the codebase every later hire inherits.
Education
A CS degree is the common path, not a requirement, and the correlation with quality is weak past the first job. What transfers is production experience: code other people depend on, running where it can break.
Experience
For a first hire, 5+ years and breadth — someone who can take a vague problem to a deployed feature without a product manager. Staff level means the work is leverage: the systems, the tooling and the standards others build on.
Vertical / domain experience
Usually not needed and often a trap — hire for engineering judgment and let them learn the domain. The exceptions are real: payments, cryptography, healthcare data, safety-critical control, and anything where a bug is a regulatory event rather than a bug.
What it pays, roughly
$90,002 median, Canada — for Computer, software and Web designers and developers, the closest occupation Statistics Canada actually measures, measured from $69,992 to $117,499 over 276,895 people. That occupation is broader than this role, so read it as an anchor, not a salary band — and note that a startup usually pays below it in cash and above it in equity.
Credentials and certifications
What exists, who issues it, and whether it means anything for this seat. A credential is evidence of a floor, never of judgment — and in a few of these roles it is a legal requirement rather than a nice-to-have.
| Credential | Issued by | When it matters | Skiploma |
|---|---|---|---|
| A note on the word “engineer” in Canada | Engineers Canada and the twelve provincial and territorial regulators | In a joint statement of July 2022 the regulators restated that “software engineer”, “computer engineer” and related IT titles prefixed with engineer may not be used by anyone not licensed as an engineer — in job titles, postings, résumés, websites or social media. APEGA obtained a court injunction against unlicensed use in 2019 and later pursued a software company over its postings. Alberta tabled Bill 7 in November 2023 proposing an exemption for the title; whether it is in force is not established here, so check your own province before writing it on a posting. This is why Canadian job ads so often say Developer. | — |
| Cloud platform professional certifications | AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure | Mild positive signal; a reviewable repository or a system in production says far more. | — |
| Security certifications (Security+, OSCP) | CompTIA, OffSec | Relevant for engineers who will own security work specifically. | — |
What this role does at each stage
The same title means three different jobs depending on how much money is in the bank. Read the stage you are at, then read the next one — that is what you are hiring toward.
The technical founder, or one contractor on a tightly specified piece. Avoid an agency building the core product; you inherit a codebase nobody on the team understands.
Two to four engineers, generalists, each able to ship end to end. No specialists yet — a frontend-only hire at this stage leaves someone idle.
Specialisation begins: data, frontend, infrastructure, and the first staff engineer whose job is other people's throughput.
Can one person hold this and something else?
The whole point of the many-hats problem: which of these jobs merge safely into one person, and which merges quietly cost you money or control.
Merges well with
- Chief Technology Officer (Founders & fractional leadership)
- Frontend Engineer / Front-End Developer
- Director of Data / Head of Data
In a small team every engineer is also on call, also the DBA and also the deploy pipeline — that is normal and should be explicit, not assumed. The merge that fails is engineer + support: interruptions destroy the work that needs long stretches.
Keep separate from
See the product manager entry — somebody has to be allowed to say the feature is not worth building.
Reading a candidate
What good looks like in an hour, and what should stop the process.
Good signals
- Reads the existing code before proposing changes
- Asks what happens when it fails
- Has operated what they built, including the bad night
Red flags
- Only greenfield experience
- Cannot explain a past design decision's trade-offs
- Needs fully specified tickets to start
What this role runs on
The software categories this job lives in. Each links to our buying brief and to the research behind it.
| Category | Who the default is | What leaving costs | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Project Management Software | Microsoft, Atlassian, Asana, Monday | The weakest in this research | The research → |
| DMS — Document Management Systems | Microsoft SharePoint (bundled in Microsoft 365), with OpenText and Hyland in enterprise ECM | The repository itself: years of documents with their version history, permissions, metadata, retention schedules and legal holds | The research → |
| CNAPP & Cloud Security Posture Management | Wiz, now inside Google | Agentless scanning needs cloud-account trust relationships, and those are granted once and rarely re-granted | The research → |