Development Lead - Air Canada Mobile Application

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 engineering leader who owns the Air Canada mobile application end to end: the iOS and Android clients, the backend-for-frontend (BFF) and API services that power them, and the build, release and operational tooling that ships the app to customers. The role combines technical leadership (architecture, technical roadmap, engineering standards and technical debt strategy for the mobile platform) with delivery leadership (code quality, release readiness and production stability) across the mobile delivery pods.

As the most senior engineer on the mobile application, the Development Lead is both the design authority for the mobile platform and the primary delivery authority within Air Canada’s enterprise architecture guardrails. The role keeps the app fast, reliable, secure, and accessible in the moments that matter most to customers, from booking and check-in to boarding and irregular operations, while keeping the codebase healthy, current and sustainable for the long term.

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

Responsibilities

- Own the technical vision, architecture and mid-to-long-term technical roadmap for the mobile application across both iOS and Android platforms as well as the backend (BFF, APIs and integrations), aligned with enterprise, solution architecture and product strategy.
- Shape the breakdown of complex requirements into clear technical tasks, anticipate risks early, and guide the team through implementation and validation.
- Serve as the primary delivery execution authority within approved architectural guardrails; apply and enforce established patterns and standards and escalate design decisions that exceed those guardrails to leadership.
- 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 delivery leads, to ensure clarity, feasibility, testability, and timely decision-making on scope changes.
- Provide first level ownership for pod production issues; coordinate triage, restore service, and communicate status and mitigation to stakeholders.
- 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. including at least four (4) years building and shipping consumer mobile applications at scale through the Apple App Store and Google Play.
- Demonstrated experience leading delivery execution within Agile teams, with Strong hands on expertise with modern programming languages and frameworks (e.g. Native iOS (Swift) with working knowledge of Android (Kotlin),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.