Sago Mini is an award-winning company devoted to play. With three subscription services and over 10 million monthly active users, Sago Mini creates apps that seed imagination, grow wonder, and bring thoughtful design to life for preschoolers and parents worldwide. Proudly Canadian, Sago Mini is a subsidiary of Spin Master, a leading global children’s entertainment company. Along with sister studios Toca Boca and Originator, Sago Mini is part of the Piknik bundle – a collection of the world’s best apps for kids in one subscription.
About the Role
Sago Mini is hiring a Senior Full Stack Developer to take on a leading technical role on our Web Store team. In this role, you will drive the development of our new Direct-to-Consumer (DTC) web channel, building and improving scalable web store services that complement our existing App Store subscription infrastructure. This role suits a senior candidate with solid technical chops who enjoys working in cross-functional teams to empower our product and marketing initiatives.
This is a 6-month engagement for an independent contractor (incorporation or sole proprietorship) for 35-40 hours per week. The role offers remote flexibility across Canada or a Toronto-hybrid arrangement. Both options require alignment with our core hours of 10am- 5pm EST/EDT.
The anticipated salary range for this independent contractor position is an hourly rate of $65 to $85/hr. The final rate offered to a successful candidate will be dependent on several factors that may include but are not limited to years of experience within the job, years of experience within the required industry, education, etc.
This job posting is tied to an open vacancy.
You’ll thrive in this role if you…
- Love building from 0 to 1: You are excited to roll up your sleeves and take ownership of building and shipping new features for a fresh DTC web store.
- Are a self-starter who values autonomy: As a contractor driving this initiative, you are comfortable managing your own momentum, building technical solutions, and delivering clean, reliable code with minimal oversight.
- Are a collaborative pragmatist: While you will be the main driver of the web store, you know how to effectively collaborate with internal engineers who will step in to help, especially when tying into existing App Store subscription systems and cross-functional services.
- Balance speed with stability: You know how to move fast to launch features, but you don't sacrifice the architectural integrity needed for a seamless user checkout experience.
- Communicate with clarity: You can easily articulate technical dependencies and requirements to internal team members, making integration phases smooth and efficient.
What You’ll Be Doing
- Drive the execution of a new web store initiative: Serve as the lead technical contributor on the new web storefront for the Piknik subscription plan, building in major blocks from payment integration to analytics, to deliver features that are fast, responsive, and highly secure.
- Build across the stack: Develop both the user-facing frontend elements that delight our customers and the robust backend services that handle the heavy lifting (auth, account management, and subscription routing).
- Implement integrations: Architect and build secure, scalable integrations with third-party payment gateways (e.g., Stripe, GTM, etc) and our internal subscription management services.
- Collaborate closely with the Web Platform team: Work day-to-day with the Engineering Manager and platform developers, participating in sprints, design reviews, and code reviews to ensure alignment with Sago Mini’s technical standards.
- Prioritize simple, scalable solutions: Evaluate technical trade-offs daily. You’ll be trusted to sweat the details where it counts, like payment security and data integrity, while knowing when to keep things simple to maintain momentum.
- Ensure quality and reliability: Write clean, testable code, implement monitoring, and utilize our modern CI/CD pipelines to ensure seamless, high-quality deployments to our AWS infrastructure.
Qualifications and Skills
- Proficiency in AI-powered software engineering: You are good at embedding AI coding tools (we use GitHub Copilot, but experience with Claude, Codex counts too) in to day to day feature design, development and verification flow, to accelerate development, improve code quality, and automate routine tasks like testing and documentation.
- Senior-level full-stack experience: You have a proven track record (5+ years) of building, scaling, and maintaining complex web applications and services from idea to launch.
- Deep expertise in our stack: You are highly proficient in TypeScript across both the frontend and backend. You have hands-on experience building backend services with JavaScript-based frameworks (we use NestJS, but experience with Express or similar tools is great too), and designing schemas with PostgreSQL.
- Frontend mastery: You have extensive experience with modern frontend frameworks (e.g., React, Next.js, or Vue) and a strong understanding of server side rendering, state management, responsive design, and web performance optimization.
- Excellent communication: You are great at translating technical concepts for product and design partners, and you know how to build trust quickly within a shared-service team.
Nice to Haves
- E-commerce & Subscription domain knowledge: You have previously built or integrated e-commerce storefronts, payment processing systems, and subscription billing lifecycles.
- Cloud infrastructure experience: You are comfortable deploying and running web services in the cloud (we use AWS) and have a solid grasp of modern open-source stacks and SaaS development tools (testing, monitoring, CI/CD).
- Independent and delivery-focused: As a contractor, you thrive in an autonomous environment. You can take ambiguous requirements, ask the right questions, and turn them into shipped features quickly and reliably.
About the Process
- Once you apply, you'll receive an email confirming that we've received your application. After we've had a chance to review your application (1-2 weeks), we'll reach out to let you know what the next steps are.
- If you are moving ahead, your first interview will be a 30 min interview where we'll learn more about you and answer any questions you have about the role.
- Next, a 45min technical phone interview with live coding challenges and technical Q&A will happen to assess your tech skills.
- Final Round (2 Parts):
- Part 1: Technical Session (60 min): You’ll team up with members of our Web Platform team to collaborate on a few new coding challenges.
- Part 2: Cross-Functional Chat (45 min): A casual chat with a cross-functional group to discuss your past experience and see how you like to work.
We welcome and encourage applications from people with disabilities. Accommodations are available upon request for candidates taking part in all aspects of the selection process.
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Based in Toronto, Sago Sago Toys is a subsidiary of Spin Master Limited a leading global children’s entertainment company that creates, designs and manufactures a diversified portfolio of innovative toys, games, products and entertainment properties. We hire humble and collaborative people who care about doing great work. Sago Mini is an equal opportunity employer. We value diversity at our company.
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