Senior Software Engineer

About LyveChat
LyveChat connects creators and audiences through live video experiences, including one-to-one sessions and livestreams. Our engineering team develops the mobile application, backend services, web experiences, and administration tools that support these experiences.

The role
You will join the Toronto team taking over development and technical operation of LyveChat from our existing development team. You will own assigned components from design through deployment and production support, working with the Product Owner to deliver business priorities reliably.
Proficiency in agentic development is required. You will direct AI agents through scoped engineering tasks, provide the right context and tools, verify their work, and improve reusable workflows. You remain accountable for the correctness, security, and maintainability of everything you deliver.**

Key responsibilities
Agentic development and AI workflows
• Use approved coding agents such as Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot agent workflows, or comparable tools for codebase exploration, implementation, debugging, testing, refactoring, and documentation.
• Turn requirements into bounded tasks with clear completion criteria. Supply relevant repository context, supervise execution, evaluate results, and correct failures using repeatable verification.
• Maintain version-controlled agent instructions, reusable skills, and verification workflows. Connect approved development tools and APIs, including MCP integrations where appropriate, with scoped access.
• Coordinate specialized agents when useful, using isolated branches or environments and reviewing the combined changes. Validate generated code, dependencies, and test results before requesting human review.
• Use AI to assist incident triage, log analysis, dependency maintenance, release notes, documentation, and ticket updates. Confirm findings against actual system evidence and measure time saved, rework, and tool cost.

Technical handover and delivery discipline
• Learn the existing architecture and codebase with the existing development team. Capture build instructions, integrations, known defects, technical debt, deployment steps, monitoring, and recovery procedures.
• Help establish company-controlled repositories, infrastructure access, app-store signing assets, vendor accounts, and secure credential management. Demonstrate an independent build, test, and deployment to a non-production environment.
• Break stories into technical tasks, estimate effort, and flag dependencies and delivery risks early. Keep Jira or equivalent records current and link tasks to pull requests, test evidence, and releases.

Application quality and production ownership Application development and integrations
• Deliver maintainable features and fixes within your specialization, following requests across mobile, web, backend, and third-party services to diagnose failures and identify impacts.
• Support creator and viewer journeys such as onboarding, booking, live sessions, purchases, payouts, and moderation. Collaborate with the Product Owner and QA on expected behaviour and edge cases.
• Build resilient integrations with secure authentication, validated inputs, timeouts, retries, and recovery. Handle duplicate events and asynchronous payment or session updates without corrupting business state.
• Improve performance, accessibility, and scalability. Document significant technical decisions and propose incremental improvements that address user impact, operating cost, and technical debt.

Testing and release engineering
• Develop meaningful unit, integration, and end-to-end tests for changed behaviour. Validate critical journeys, error conditions, device or browser compatibility, and relevant performance limits.
• Maintain continuous integration and deployment pipelines with automated quality checks, dependency and secret scanning, reproducible builds, and clear separation of development, test, and production environments.
• Prepare safe deployments and database migrations with rollout checks, recovery options, and post-release verification. Maintain release documentation and support app-store submissions where relevant.

Reliability and application management
• Maintain useful logs, metrics, traces, crash reporting, and alerts. Agree service targets with the team and detect failures affecting availability, payments, or successful live experiences.
• Diagnose production issues, restore service, and complete root-cause fixes. Participate in the agreed support rotation and maintain practical runbooks, escalation routes, and incident records.
• Maintain cloud configuration and infrastructure as code where appropriate. Test backups and restoration, manage certificates and dependency upgrades, and track infrastructure and integration costs.

Security and controlled automation
• Apply secure coding, least-privilege access, secret management, and appropriate data retention. Protect account permissions, payment integrity, personal information, and moderation controls.
• Configure AI tools with approved data access, sandboxing, and spending limits. Recognize prompt injection and unsafe tool instructions; protect source code, credentials, and customer data.
• Keep human review and approved release controls for production changes, data deletion, permissions, and financial actions. Use AI assistance within those controls and verify the outcome.

Working with the Product Owner
• The Product Owner owns backlog priorities and product acceptance. You own technical estimates, implementation, testing, and support for assigned components. Work with the engineering lead on architecture and technical release readiness. Meet the agreed Definition of Done, close review findings, and track implementation, acceptance, and release separately.

Qualifications and success measures Required experience
• Five or more years of professional software engineering experience, including shipping production applications and taking ownership of an existing codebase.
• Strong programming, debugging, design, and code-review skills in your primary specialization. Ability to explain, test, and repair code delivered with AI assistance.
• Demonstrable hands-on proficiency with agentic coding tools, repository context, reusable instructions, automated verification, and safe tool permissions. Ability to adapt workflows as tools evolve.
• Practical experience with Git, automated testing, CI/CD, APIs, databases, secure development, and production troubleshooting across connected application components.
• Reliable sprint execution, clear documentation, and early communication of blockers. Ability to work from the Toronto office and coordinate planned overlap during the development handover.

Specialization requirements
• Each position has a primary focus and shares integration and reliability responsibilities. Language and framework expertise must match the assigned LyveChat codebase.
• Mobile focus: production iOS and Android delivery using the relevant native or cross-platform stack; live video SDKs, device permissions, session state, reconnection, notifications, in-app purchases, crash diagnosis, and app-store releases.
• Backend and web focus: production APIs, databases, asynchronous processing, authentication and authorization, payment web hooks, administrative interfaces, frontend testing, cloud deployment, and reliable third-party integrations.

Priorities for the first 90 days
• First 30 days: reproduce the application locally, map dependencies and handover gaps, and complete a reviewed fix using an AI workflow with verifiable tests.
• By 60 days: deliver an agreed feature or release, strengthen tests and agent instructions, and demonstrate deployment, monitoring, and recovery for assigned components.
• By 90 days: meet technical handover criteria, support components independently, and propose improvements to reliability, delivery speed, cost, and technical debt.

How success will be measured
• Targets will be agreed after establishing a baseline:
• Delivery and quality: sprint goal contribution, cycle time, reliable forecasts, maintainable changes, and defects escaping to production.
• Operations and transition: release stability, recovery time, accepted handover evidence, useful documentation, and demonstrated internal capability.
• AI effectiveness: verified time savings and useful automation, measured alongside rework, security findings, and tool expenditure.
• During selection, demonstrate an AI-assisted repository change. Explain your task plan, context, permissions, code review, test evidence, and recovery approach.

LyveChat welcomes applicants from diverse backgrounds. Accommodations are available on request throughout the recruitment process.