Senior Software Engineer

About Us

HONK is modernizing parking payments across North America. We help municipalities, universities, and private operators move from physical infrastructure to digital permits, mobile payments, and smarter operator tools. We process hundreds of millions of dollars in payments a year and over 2 million transactions a month. HONK has just been named to The Globe and Mail’s ranking of Canada’s Top Growing Companies for the seventh consecutive year.

Role Overview

We’re hiring a Senior Software Engineer to build and own systems end-to-end on the platform behind HONK’s growth. You’ll deliver new capabilities, strengthen the foundation underneath them, and keep everything fast as volume climbs.

You prefer simple, maintainable solutions over clever ones. You’re comfortable debugging across the full stack, and you communicate clearly with product managers, partner teams, and non-technical stakeholders.

AI-native engineering: AI is central to how we build. Claude Code is a daily tool for implementation, testing, refactoring, and investigation, and we expect fluency from day one. Outcomes are still what count. You own every line that lands in production, whether you typed it or an agent did.

Our stack: Ruby on Rails hosted on AWS; React front-end; Terraform for IaC.

Key Responsibilities

• Design, build, and ship features across Rails APIs, React, and background jobs; partner with Product and Design to break down work, estimate, and deliver iteratively.
• Use Claude Code as a core part of your workflow, delegating implementation, tests, refactors, and codebase investigation to agents while directing the work with clear specs.
• Contribute to system design and architectural discussions; align work with our modular-monolith approach (service extraction when justified) and design for scale.
• Lead database design: schema modeling, indexing, safe/online migrations, and archival/partitioning strategies; investigate and resolve slow queries.
• Build, maintain, and evolve our APIs, including our Partner API: consistent conventions, pagination, versioning, and backward compatibility.
• Drive app infrastructure initiatives such as Rails upgrades, dependency management, and CI/CD pipeline improvements; keep the platform current, secure, and maintainable.
• Write unit and integration tests with useful coverage, and champion testing best practices across the organization.
• Instrument your work with metrics, logs, and traces; set actionable alerts; troubleshoot production issues with a focus on root-cause analysis and long-term fixes over quick ones.
• Raise engineering standards through thoughtful PR reviews, pairing, and improvements to linting, static analysis (ex: RuboCop), and CI gates.

Qualifications

• 6+ years of professional software engineering experience with strong proficiency in Ruby on Rails.
• Extensive, hands-on use of agentic coding tools (Claude Code or similar): writing clear context and specs, decomposing tasks, rigorously reviewing generated code, and knowing when not to reach for an agent.
• Strong SQL and relational data modeling skills; comfortable with query optimization.
• Experience designing and consuming RESTful APIs.
• Experience building modern front-ends in a major JavaScript framework such as React or Angular.
• Clear communicator who can frame trade-offs, write concise design notes, and collaborate effectively across functions.
• Familiarity with AWS and modern delivery practices (Docker/ECS, CI/CD, Terraform).
• Demonstrated ability to debug across browser, API, background jobs, and database layers.

Bonus Points

• Experience in payments or parking tech.
• Built internal AI tooling: custom Claude Code commands or skills, MCP servers, agent-friendly repo conventions, or evaluation harnesses for AI-generated code.
• Led AI adoption on a team, with measurable results.
• Exposure to cross-platform mobile development (ex: React Native).

Compensation & Benefits

• Salary: $140,000 - $160,000 CAD
• Work Environment: Hybrid, 1 day/week in our midtown Toronto office. Flexibility to work outside of the country for short periods each year.
• Benefits Package: Comprehensive health, dental, and vision coverage.