About Actual™

Hospitality is built on actuals, that's not just our tagline, it's how we operate. At Actual™, we're building the payment infrastructure hospitality businesses run on, moving millions of dollars in hard-earned tips directly to the employees who earned them. No cash envelope, no spreadsheet, no two-week wait.

Our flagship product, Actual™ Tips, handles tip pooling, instant tip payouts, cashless tip distribution, reporting, and compliance, so operators can eliminate manual admin and reduce payroll burden. Beyond tips, Actual Ops gives operators a live view of labor cost, cost of goods sold, purchases, and data-driven sales forecasts, replacing gut-based scheduling decisions with real numbers. And Actual Payroll extends that same automation to payroll itself, built specifically for hospitality operators and their teams.

Backed by N49P, Northside Ventures, Union Capital, and other investors, we're trusted by restaurants, hotels, and coffee shops across Canada to move real money reliably. The numbers you can trust.

The role

Our growth is why we’re hiring an Infrastructure Engineer.

We’re investing in the next stage of our platform, building the systems, tooling, automation, and operational excellence that will support the next phase of growth. This role will play a key part in ensuring our infrastructure scales alongside the business and enables the engineering team to move quickly with confidence.

As our Infrastructure Engineer, you’ll own the platform that our engineering team builds on.

You’ll work closely with our VP of Engineering and Staff Engineers to improve deployment pipelines, observability, cloud infrastructure, security, disaster recovery, and developer experience. Your work will help every engineer ship faster, respond to incidents with confidence, and build systems that are reliable by design.

You’ll make deployments predictable, improve how we monitor and operate production systems, automate away repetitive work, and build the infrastructure that supports a rapidly growing fintech platform. Success means engineers spend less time thinking about infrastructure and more time building products, while our customers continue to experience a platform that’s fast, secure, and dependable.

What you'll own

In your first few months:

  • The deployment path. Our CI/CD pipeline is new and works, but it's manually triggered across four environments in two countries. You'll take it from "works" to "trustworthy and automatic,".

  • Resilience and recovery. We rely on relational databases, distributed key-value stores, and asynchronous task queues in production for money movement. We need to design, document, and test comprehensive recovery strategies across our core data and orchestration layers.

  • Backup and disaster recovery. You'll own our backup and disaster recovery program, including recovery objectives and regular rehearsal.

Over the year:

  • Observability that answers questions. We run DataDog and Sentry today. You'll deepen how we use them, so that questions about any individual money movement can be answered quickly and directly by whoever needs the answer.

  • Environment parity. Bringing our staging environments closer to production, so issues surface early and cheaply.

  • Secrets, access, and boundaries. Our password management platform is deployed across production and direct production SSH access has been removed. You'll keep maturing access control and scoping as part of the security and compliance work this role carries.

  • Cost and capacity. Infrastructure spend, database growth, and scaling headroom - owning the numbers and the forecast.

What we're looking for

  • Substantial experience running production infrastructure for a SaaS product at meaningful scale. This is the single most important thing. We need someone who has seen systems get bigger and knows which problems arrive next.

  • Deep comfort with containerized Python services. Our stack is Python and Django, PostgreSQL, Celery, Redis, Docker, and React. You don't need to have used exactly this combination, but you should be genuinely at home in this shape of system.

  • Real CI/CD ownership. You've built or substantially rebuilt a deployment pipeline, including the unglamorous parts: database migrations, rollbacks, environment configuration, secrets.

  • Infrastructure as code and a preference for repeatable over clever. Whatever tooling you've used, we care that you leave systems someone else can operate.

  • Operational judgment about money. You understand that a failed deploy on a tips platform means someone doesn't get paid today. We're looking for the instinct to make the cautious choice under uncertainty, and the honesty to say when something isn't ready.

  • The ability to work independently across a distributed team. Our engineers are spread across Canada and Europe. You'll need to communicate clearly in writing and drive work without someone assembling your week for you.

Helpful, not required: fintech, payments, or payroll experience; PCI or SOC 2 work; Kubernetes at a company that genuinely needed it; database performance tuning; having been the first infrastructure hire somewhere before.

What this role is not

We'd rather be direct than have you discover this in week three.

This is a hands-on individual contributor role, not a management position and not a platform-team lead - there's no team under you today. It's also not an architecture role: two staff engineers own our technical direction and the money-movement design, and they're good at it. Your domain is infrastructure and operational maturity, and it's genuinely yours, but it has edges.

You'd be joining a company where infrastructure hasn’t gotten as much attention in favour of shipping, which means the first year involves real cleanup alongside the greenfield work. If that prospect is energizing rather than discouraging, we should talk. If you want to arrive somewhere with a mature platform team and well-worn runbooks, this isn't that job, and we won't waste your time pretending it is.

How we work

We're a small engineering organization - around thirty people across the company - which means your work is visible and your judgment carries weight. We run two-week sprints, we're deliberate about the balance between feature work and platform investment, and every engineer here uses AI tooling as a normal part of the job.

We're remote-first with a distributed team, and we're honest about the tradeoffs that come with it: strong written communication matters more here than it would in an office.

Compensation and details

  • Salary: $161,000 - $211,000 CAD, based on experience and depth in the areas above

  • Location: Remote within Canada

  • Full-time permanent position

How to apply

Click here to submit your details - https://bsxn99lvr70.typeform.com/to/dYCyfY1t . We're most interested in one specific thing: tell us about a piece of infrastructure you inherited or built that made a team measurably faster or safer, and how you knew it worked.

No cover letter template required. We read every application.

Actual is an equal opportunity employer. We welcome applications from people of all backgrounds and are committed to building a team that reflects the diversity of the industry we serve. Accommodations are available on request at any stage of the hiring process - just let us know what you need.