Backend Developer (.NET)

About the role

About us

Appnovation is the AI Product Company. Headquartered in Vancouver, Canada, with teams around the world, Appnovation builds AI products, delivers enterprise AI and digital solutions, and co-invests with clients to bring new AI products to market.

Open source has been the foundation of Appnovation's work since 2007, and it remains the foundation underneath every AI product the company builds today. Appnovation teams work with organizations in highly regulated industries, including global leaders such as Pfizer, Google and AstraZeneca, to help them adopt AI they can govern and own.

As a Senior Software Engineer - Backend, you will build the .NET services that carry the core business logic of a modern operational SaaS platform for K-12 education. The platform automates administrative processes for school divisions, so the backend work is workflow-heavy and integration-heavy: you will develop REST APIs consumed by a Next.js frontend, implement durable multi-step business processes as Temporal workflows, build worker services for asynchronous and scheduled processing, and write the integration services that publish and consume events across system boundaries.

You will work as part of a dedicated, cross-functional scrum team that operates as an embedded extension of the client's engineering organization. The team includes business analysis and QA capability and owns assigned product services end-to-end - from refinement through development, testing, documentation, and release readiness. You will work directly in the client's repositories, follow their established architecture and engineering standards, and deliver in small, reviewable increments.

The data layer spans a PostgreSQL transactional model and a ClickHouse analytics store, with authorization enforced through Keycloak and OpenFGA - a real requirement in a multi-tenant product where an administrator in one school division must never see another's data. The platform is moving from pilot deployments toward general availability, so this is a role for a senior engineer who cares about correctness in distributed systems - idempotency, retries, and what happens when the third call fails - and who is ready to own significant slices of the platform with minimal supervision.

Key Responsibilities:

- Developing and maintaining .NET Core REST APIs, including versioning, validation, error semantics, and Swagger/OpenAPI documentation

- Building worker services for background, scheduled, and queue-driven asynchronous processing

- Writing integration services that publish and consume events over pub/sub, against clearly defined message contracts

- Modelling and querying relational data in PostgreSQL using Entity Framework Core, including migrations and query performance tuning

- Building and maintaining API calls into ClickHouse

- Enforcing authorization in application code against OpenFGA policies, and integrating with Keycloak for OAuth 2.0 / OpenID Connect authentication and SSO