About Showpass: At Showpass, we're reigniting the joy of live experiences. From massive stadium concerts to local community festivals, our mission is to empower event organizers with tools that elevate the fan experience. We believe that great events create lasting memories, and we’re here to make those moments unforgettable. Join us and be part of a passionate team driving innovation in the event tech space.
Role Overview: As a Backend Developer at Showpass, you’ll play a key role in shaping the digital experience for thousands of event organizers and millions of attendees worldwide. You will build scalable, high-performance backend systems and optimize applications for maximum speed and scalability, contributing to a seamless experience for our customers and clients.
THE ROLE: Backend Developer - Intermediate to Senior level; title and role scope will be based on experience and interview performance.
THE LOCATION: Calgary, AB
THE RESPONSIBILITIES:
- Collaborate with developers and designers to create exciting new features and elegant, user-friendly pages
- Write clean, testable, reliable, and sustainable code
- Contribute to the architectural design and implementation of scalable backend systems
- Ensure the performance, quality, and responsiveness of applications
- Identify and correct bottlenecks and fix bugs
- Optimize applications for maximum speed and scalability
- Quickly learn and integrate new technologies, frameworks, and concepts
- Stay up-to-date with emerging technologies and industry trends
- Participate in routine stand-ups, code reviews, and testing sessions
- Mentor junior developers and provide technical guidance
MUST HAVE QUALIFICATIONS:
- Minimum 3 years of production backend experience in Python/Django (preferred) or an equivalent framework (FastAPI/Flask/Rails/Node)
- Experience with relational databases with a PostgreSQL emphasis: indexing and query tuning, locking and transaction isolation, EXPLAIN/ANALYZE, and safe, zero-downtime migrations
- Experience with Celery and Redis (or equivalents): idempotent processing, retries with randomized backoff, dead-letter queues, outbox/inbox patterns, and de-duplication keys
- Follows API design best practices: clear and consistent contracts, pagination, predictable error responses, idempotent endpoints; authentication and authorization (OAuth 2.0 or OpenID Connect, role-based access)
- Experience testing at multiple levels (unit, integration, end-to-end) and debugging skills using logs, metrics, and distributed traces
- Follows collaborative habits: readable code, constructive reviews, and short written proposals for non-trivial changes
- Analytical thinker with the ability to problems solve in a fast-paced work environment
BONUS IF YOU HAVE EXPERIENCE WITH:
- ClickHouse for analytics (materialized views and rollups) or similar columnar databases
- Change Data Capture pipelines and data workflows (ETL/ELT); reconciliation jobs for orders and payments
- Google Cloud Platform (for example, Google Kubernetes Engine or Cloud Run), Docker and Kubernetes
- Deeper observability: OpenTelemetry, Sentry or Datadog, and well-designed service level indicators and objectives
- Collaborating with frontend teams to shape API contracts (React/Next.js)
SENIOR LEVEL QUALIFICATIONS (Nice to have, not required):
- Own services end-to-end: define service level objectives, track latency and availability, lead incident response and post-incident reviews
- Experience with advanced PostgreSQL: diagnosing lock contention, planning safe backfills or table partitioning, truly zero-downtime migrations under live traffic
- Design for high traffic by ensuring exactly-once outcomes using idempotency, concurrency controls, and failure-mode handling
- Experience with domain-driven design: clear boundaries and aggregates in a Django codebase
- Performance and caching at scale: cache-aside patterns with Redis, content delivery network fundamentals, safe cache invalidation
- Previously led or mentored technical team members
Showpass is committed to employment equity, welcomes diversity in the workplace, and encourages applications from all qualified individuals. We thank all interested applicants; however, only qualified applicants selected for an interview will be contacted.
