Developer Ii (12-Month Contract)

As the largest Canadian-owned and operated K-12 publisher, Nelson Education Ltd. is Canada's only heritage education content provider, known for its innovative products and solutions catering to learners across the country.

Nelson is on a mission to make learning accessible, engaging, and effective for all. That's why Nelson continuously strives to create dynamic curriculum-aligned content that caters to diverse learning styles, fostering critical thinking, creativity, and life-long learning.

In response to the evolving education landscape, Nelson developed Edwin, a digital learning ecosystem. Edwin is a learning platform for classroom success, providing curriculum-linked content, engaging tools and unparalleled support to reach every student.

Nelson is redefining education and making a positive impact on the way knowledge is acquired and shared by creating the possible, one learner at a time.

Reporting to the Team Lead, the Developer II is responsible for building, maintaining, and supporting internal applications, services, data pipelines, and platform tooling. The person in this position implements new features and functionality, improves application reliability and performance, supports deployment workflows, troubleshoots system issues, and helps maintain secure and scalable development and production environments.

This role combines software development with DevOps-oriented responsibilities, including CI/CD, observability, Kubernetes-based deployments, logging, monitoring, and operational support.

• Design, develop, and maintain internal applications, backend services, APIs, integrations, and data pipelines.
• Write clean, maintainable, secure, and efficient code.
• Collaborate with product, engineering, QA, infrastructure, and operations teams to understand requirements and deliver reliable solutions.
• Troubleshoot, debug, and resolve application, integration, deployment, and environment-related issues.
• Support CI/CD pipelines, automated builds, deployments, and release processes.
• Assist with configuration, deployment, and monitoring of applications running in containerized or Kubernetes-based environments.
• Work with logging, monitoring, and observability tools, including Elastic Stack / ELK, to diagnose issues and improve system reliability.
• Support application performance monitoring, alerting, and production-readiness practices.
• Write automated tests and validation checks to improve code quality and reliability.
• Participate in code reviews and contribute to shared engineering standards.
• Help improve development workflows, deployment processes, and operational best practices.
• Support secure software development practices, access control, secrets management, and environment configuration.
• Participate in security reviews, threat modelling discussions, and remediation of vulnerabilities identified by SCA, SAST, or DAST tooling.
• Apply secure coding practices for common risks (OWASP Top 10), including input validation, authentication and authorization (OAuth, JWT, RBAC), and safe handling of sensitive data.
• Support incident response, on-call rotations, and post-incident reviews for production issues.
• Contribute to infrastructure-as-code reviews, environment hygiene, and operational runbooks for the services you own.
• Stay current with backend development, cloud-native practices, DevOps tools, and operational techniques.
• Actively participate in the SCRUM process.

Must have

• 5 years of work experience with several of the following technologies and practices
• TypeScript or JavaScript
• Node.js, Express, Golang or similar backend frameworks
• REST APIs, or service-to-service integrations
• RDBMS and NoSQL databases
• Git, npm, yarn, or similar development tooling
• Automated testing frameworks and code quality tools
• CI/CD tools and deployment pipelines
• Docker or other containerization tools
• Kubernetes concepts and experience deploying or supporting applications in Kubernetes-based environments
• Elastic Stack / ELK, including Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana, or related observability tools
• Application logging, monitoring, alerting, and troubleshooting
• Cloud or hosted infrastructure environments
• Secure software development and operational best practices
• Hands-on experience with at least one major cloud provider (AWS, Azure, or GCP), including networking basics (DNS, TLS, load balancers, ingress).
• Familiarity with secrets management tooling (e.g., Vault, AWS Secrets Manager, sealed secrets) and dependency/vulnerability scanning.
• Database operations experience: schema migrations, indexing, and basic performance tuning.
• Linux/shell fluency and comfort with on-call or production support responsibilities.

Nice to Have

• Experience supporting applications in development, staging, and production environments.
• Experience with infrastructure-as-code or deployment tools such as Terraform, Helm, or similar technologies.
• Experience with Kubernetes manifests, Helm charts, ingress, services, secrets, config maps, and deployment troubleshooting.
• Experience building or maintaining observability dashboards, alerts, and log-based troubleshooting workflows.
• Familiarity with cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud.
• Experience with data pipelines, background jobs, queues, or event-driven systems.
• Familiarity with frontend frameworks such as React or Next.js is helpful but not required.
• Ability to balance feature development with operational reliability, maintainability, and security.
• Strong communication skills and the ability to work effectively with both software development and infrastructure teams.
• Exposure to compliance frameworks such as SOC 2, ISO 27001, PCI, or HIPAA, and the engineering practices required to support them.
• Experience with backup, disaster recovery, and cost/capacity awareness in cloud environments.

Compensation

The base salary range for this contract full-time position begins at $95,000+ per annum based on experience. Compensation is part of our broader Total Rewards package, which includes benefits and programs that support employee well-being and growth.

What We Offer

At Nelson, we believe in taking care of our people.

Your well-being, growth, and work-life balance matter to us, which is why we offer a comprehensive benefits package designed to support you - professionally and personally.

The below benefits apply to this temporary contract position:

• This role is primarily on-site with some hybrid flexibility, M-F, standard business hours
• Commuter friendly location (Sheppard & Don Mills)
• Free parking on-site
• Free, convenient shuttle bus service from Don Mills Subway Station to and from the office
• Access to on-site fitness center and fitness classes
• Access to Linkedin Learning for continuous skill growth
• Mentorship and professional development opportunities
• A comprehensive Employee Assistance Program (EAP) providing confidential support spanning from mental health services to financial counselling, and many things in-between.

Don't have 100% of the above qualifications? Do you still think Nelson is a great fit for you? We encourage you to apply anyway!

Our EDI Statement

Nelson teaches the world by learning from everyone in it.

We are committed to fostering an equitable, diverse, and inclusive workplace environment. This is an integral part of our company’s culture and mission that aligns with our four key pillars of Employee Diversity, Developing Authentic and Accurate Content, Amplifying External Voices, and Supporting the Local Community and Beyond.

We believe in the power of education and our ability to impact social change. Truth, honesty, integrity, and respect guide our decisions and actions in the development of learning solutions that empower success for all educators and learners.

We value a respectful, inclusive, and safe workplace that nurtures belonging and represents many different cultures, backgrounds, perspectives, and opinions. Everyone is free to be who they are.

We foster and continue to build relationships that are equitable, diverse, and inclusive with existing and future partners in education.

We commit to holding ourselves accountable by creating measurable short and long-term goals that place equity, diversity, and inclusion at the core of what we do in our resources, the workplace, the educational community, and in the larger society.

We strive to build an inclusive world for everyone. We are stronger together.

AI and Automated Hiring Tools

Nelson uses AI support tools in our applicant tracking system to help with tasks such as summarizing points and anonymizing applications. All candidate screening, assessments, and hiring decisions are done by people.

Interview Outcome Notification

Nelson is committed to keeping candidates informed. All candidates who attend an interview for a publicly advertised role will be notified of the outcome of their candidacy. Candidates will be notified of the hiring decision no later than 45 days after the last interview.

Our Commitment

Nelson is an equal opportunity employer and is committed to Inclusion, Equity and Diversity. As part of this commitment, we do not discriminate on the basis of age, race, sex, gender, gender identity, colour, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, marital status, citizenship, veteran status, or disability status.

Should you require any accommodation during our recruitment and selection process, please reach out to peopleandengagement@nelson.com.