Development Lead - Application Development

Being part of Air Canada is to become part of an iconic Canadian symbol, recently ranked the best Airline in North America. Let your career take flight by joining our diverse and vibrant team at the leading edge of passenger aviation.

Join Air Canada—an iconic Canadian brand and North America’s top ranked airline—as we continue to evolve our digital platforms supporting critical operational and customer experiences.

The Development Lead is a senior, hands-on technical leader who drives technical direction, sprint execution, and delivery outcomes within an Agile delivery pod. This role owns technical solution design, delivery predictability, code quality, and release readiness, ensuring solutions align with enterprise architecture, engineering standards, and business objectives.

The Development Lead provides day to day technical leadership through delivery coordination, coaching, and hands on contribution. The Development Lead is the primary execution authority within approved architectural guardrails, escalating design decisions that fall outside defined patterns, and ensuring operational learnings are fed back into the backlog.

Let your career take flight by joining a team that’s redefining the digital passenger experience at the forefront of global aviation.

Responsibilities

- Lead sprint commitments, delivery predictability, and delivery outcomes for the pod; proactively manages scope, dependencies, and trade offs to meet agreed objectives.
- Lead day to day sprint execution, ensuring stories and tasks are well defined, estimated, sequenced, and delivered according to agreed commitments.
- Shape the breakdown of complex requirements into clear technical tasks, anticipate risks early, and guide the team through implementation and validation.
- Lead technical solution design for complex requirements, evaluating design options, technical trade-offs, dependencies, scalability, performance, security, and maintainability.
- Define and communicate technical approaches, design patterns, integration strategies, and implementation standards to guide development within the pod.
- Serve as the primary technical authority across the pods; define implementation approaches, apply architectural patterns and engineering standards, make technical decisions within established guardrails, and escalate decisions requiring broader enterprise alignment.
- Drive readiness for production releases, including completion of quality gates (tests, security checks, performance), runbooks/operational documentation, observability coverage, and rollback/mitigation plans.
- Uphold and enforce engineering standards for coding, testing, documentation, security, observability, and responsible AI practices within the pod.
- Champion high quality peer code reviews, including AI generated code, focusing on maintainability, performance, reliability, and adherence to approved patterns.
- Lead and support complex or high risk feature implementations, balancing delivery timelines with technical quality and operational risk.
- Own unit testing strategy, test automation, and AI evaluation coverage to ensure quality gates are consistently met and defects are prevented.
- Enhance CI/CD pipeline efficiency, build automation, and AI assisted development workflows to improve deployment frequency and developer productivity.
- Partner with Product Owners, QA, Designers, and Scrum Masters to ensure clarity, feasibility, testability, and timely decision-making on scope changes.
- Provide technical ownership for production issues; lead triage, investigation, mitigation, and service restoration, and coordinate with other technical teams when escalation or cross-team support is required.
- Lead root cause analysis (RCA) for pod owned incidents/defects and drive corrective and preventive actions; ensure learnings are translated into backlog items and completed.
- Establish and maintain clear, accurate, and up to date technical and prompt documentation to support maintainability, onboarding, and operational support.
- Monitor and improve delivery and quality metrics such as defect rates, PR lead time, deployment frequency, rollback frequency, and reliability indicators; leverage data to drive improvement actions.
- Provide day to day technical leadership and mentoring through pairing, feedback, and guidance; foster a culture of craftsmanship, accountability, collaboration, and continuous improvement.
- Design, develop, modify, integrate, maintain and troubleshoot software applications and services.
- Write, read, review, test, debug and correct software code for new features and enhancements to existing systems.
- Analyse technical requirements, dependencies and system interactions, and recommend modifications or implementation approaches.
- Perform peer code and pull-request reviews, providing feedback on correctness, maintainability, performance, reliability, security and adherence to standards.
- Support technical integrations, investigate defects and production issues, implement fixes, and validate solutions through testing.
- Create and maintain technical documentation for new and updated software.

Personal Attributes

- Inspires and energizes engineering teams with a high level of enthusiasm, fostering a culture of excellence and ownership.
- Demonstrates a forward-thinking, innovative mindset—constantly exploring emerging technologies and unconventional solutions to complex challenges.
- Builds and sustains a culture of trust, transparency, and psychological safety, enabling open dialogue and empowering diverse perspectives.
- Challenges assumptions and the status quo with curiosity and courage, driving continuous improvement and elevating team performance.
- Balances strategic vision with hands-on technical guidance, ensuring alignment between business goals and engineering execution.
- Leads by example with integrity, resilience, and a commitment to mentoring others toward their full potential.

Qualifications

Required

- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related field.
- Minimum five (5) years of experience in software development in a production environment.
- Demonstrated experience leading delivery execution within Agile teams, with accountability for sprint commitments, delivery outcomes, and code quality Strong hands on expertise with modern programming languages and frameworks (e.g., Java, Node.js, React, React Native, Angular, NestJS).
- Solid experience working with CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, and modern DevOps practices.
- Proven ability to uphold engineering standards, guide code quality, and support sprint level delivery commitments.
- Strong communication skills with the ability to collaborate effectively across technical and non technical roles.
- Demonstrate punctuality and dependability to support overall team success in a fast-paced environment.

Assets

- Experience with AI assisted development tools, prompt design, or AI evaluation frameworks.
- Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP) and cloud native architecture patterns.
- Exposure to API platforms, integration technologies, or enterprise systems.
- Background in large scale, regulated, or mission critical environments.

Conditions of Employment

Candidates must be eligible to work in the country of interest at the time any offer of employment is made and are responsible for obtaining any required work permits, visas, or other authorizations necessary for employment. Prior to their start date, candidates will also need to provide proof of their eligibility to work in the country of interest.

Linguistic Requirements

Based on equal qualifications, preference will be given to bilingual candidates.

Diversity and Inclusion

Air Canada is strongly committed to Diversity and Inclusion and aims to create a healthy, accessible and rewarding work environment which highlights employees’ unique contributions to our company’s success.

As an equal opportunity employer, we welcome applications from all to help us build a diverse workforce which reflects the diversity of our customers, and communities, in which we live and serve.

Air Canada thanks all candidates for their interest; however only those selected to continue in the process will be contacted.