Staff Engineer, Toronto, Ontario - Sun Life

AI Summary

This Staff Engineer role at Sun Life's Prospr team in Toronto, Ontario, focuses on solving complex technical challenges and bridging the gap between architecture and production. Key duties involve rapid prototyping, diagnosing incidents, and setting quality standards across development squads. Candidates require at least eight years of professional software engineering experience, with lead-level expertise in Java, React, and enterprise integrations. This position is ideal for a hands-on builder comfortable influencing technical direction and driving product innovation.

About the Staff Engineer Opportunity at Sun Life

Sun Life's Prospr initiative is revolutionising how Canadians access insurance and wealth solutions, operating with startup velocity within a Fortune 500 company. As a Staff Engineer, you will be the crucial technical unblocker and problem-solver, tackling the most challenging issues to ensure successful product delivery. This role demands a deep technical understanding, enabling you to transform abstract ideas into tangible, working software that directly impacts production environments. You will play a pivotal role in designing the path for major strategic initiatives and seeing them through to successful deployment. Your expertise will be vital in advising engineering and product leaders, offering well-considered options, trade-offs, and recommendations. The ability to move fast, test ideas quickly, and integrate AI to enhance customer experience is central to the team's mission. You will make a significant impact on the quality and pace across various squads, performing rapid prototyping to validate approaches before extensive sprint cycles are committed. This ensures efficiency and a faster time to market for new features that brighten the lives of Sun Life's clients across Canada. You will also bridge the gap between architectural designs and the realities of production, ensuring that solutions are not just theoretically sound but also practically implementable and robust.

Who Sun Life is Looking For

Sun Life is seeking a highly experienced and technically proficient individual for this Staff Engineer position. The ideal candidate will possess at least eight years of professional software engineering experience, demonstrating senior-level ownership and significant cross-team influence. Essential technical skills include hands-on, lead-level expertise with Java, React (or similar modern JavaScript frameworks), and enterprise integrations; Salesforce experience is considered a valuable asset. This role requires a deep technical expert who can seamlessly jump across various domains, including backend, frontend, integrations, data, and AI, continuously learning and adapting to an ever-changing technology landscape. You must be a hands-on builder, capable of whipping up prototypes quickly and debugging complex production systems effectively. Strong technical communication skills are paramount, enabling you to articulate intricate concepts clearly to Product teams, Architects, and senior leadership. A startup mindset is essential, meaning you can ship fast without compromising core functionalities or quality. You will be comfortable influencing technical direction without direct authority, ensuring decisions are accelerated, rework is minimised, and releases keep moving. Your proven success in owning end-to-end delivery for customer-facing digital products, from planning to build, release, and operation, with measurable outcomes, is key. This includes experience setting and running an engineering operating cadence across prioritisation, planning, execution, dependencies, quality, and incident learnings. Furthermore, a strong track record of developing talent through mentoring and raising the technical bar across squads is highly valued, contributing to the overall growth and experience of the engineering team at Sun Life.