Backend Engineer / Back-End Developer
Builds what the customer never sees: the data model, the APIs, the jobs that run at 3am, and the part that has to still be correct when it is under load.
Who to hire
The shape of person who does this job well — and whether you should be hiring it at all yet.
The half of the team that outlasts fashion. Interface frameworks turn over every few years; the schema you choose in month three will still be there in year five, which is why a strong backend hire early pays for itself more reliably than a strong frontend one.
Education
A CS degree is the common path and not a requirement. Judge the data model they designed and the one they regret.
Experience
4+ years, 7+ to own a system. Ask for the worst production incident they caused and what they changed afterwards; backend seniority is mostly accumulated scar tissue.
Vertical / domain experience
Matters where correctness is regulated or irreversible — payments, ledgers, clinical records, anything with an audit trail. Elsewhere, general engineering judgment travels.
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 running system you can be walked through says far more. | — |
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.
One of your first two hires, and usually the first: a generalist who leans backend can ship a whole product; the reverse is rarer.
A backend group with an owner for the data layer and a real on-call rotation.
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
- Software Engineer / Developer
- DevOps Engineer / DevOps Specialist
- Database Administrator (DBA)
- Solutions Architect / Technical Architect
Backend and DevOps merge in a small team and should: whoever designs the system should feel what it costs to run. Backend and DBA merge until the data is large or regulated enough to need a specialist.
Keep separate from
Engineers test their own work, and that is not the same as having someone whose job is to find what they missed.
Reading a candidate
What good looks like in an hour, and what should stop the process.
Good signals
- Draws the data model before writing code
- Asks what happens when the third-party API is down
- Has deleted a service they built
Red flags
- Microservices for a team of three
- No view on migrations or rollback
- Cannot explain an index
The same role in three kinds of company
This job changes shape depending on who is paying for it. An agency sells the hours, a contract shop delivers into someone else's estate, and a product company is building something it keeps — and the same title means something different in each.
In an agency
In an agency this is the role that gets reused across client projects, so the person who writes reusable scaffolding is worth two who do not.
On a client contract
On a client contract, insist the schema and the migrations are in the client’s repository from day one. The code is the deliverable; the data model is the asset.
In a product company
In a product company this is where the compounding happens — and where a rushed decision in year one is paid for in every year after.
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 → |