Development Lead (Back-end Systems)

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, day-to-day execution, delivery predictability, and outcomes for the pod; ensure stories and tasks are well defined, estimated, sequenced, and delivered, proactively managing scope, dependencies, technical priorities, and trade-offs.
- Break down complex requirements into clear technical tasks, analyse system interactions and dependencies, anticipate risks early, and guide implementation and validation.
- Lead technical solution design and own implementation-level architectural decisions within approved guardrails, ensuring alignment with enterprise technology standards and long-term product vision; evaluate scalability, performance, security, maintainability, and design trade-offs.
- Drive and review low-level design specifications for clarity, feasibility, and alignment with high-level architecture; apply approved modern patterns, including microservices, serverless, and modular component architecture, and obtain
Technical Lead approval for high-risk designs or departures from approved patterns.
- Define and evolve the pod’s technical strategy, implementation approaches, integration strategies, and engineering practices within enterprise standards; participate in cross-team initiatives to promote consistent technical guidelines across pods and platforms.
- Serve as the primary technical execution authority within the pod; apply architectural patterns and engineering standards, make technical decisions within established guardrails, and escalate decisions affecting shared services, cross-pod designs, or broader enterprise alignment to the Technical Lead.
- Drive production release readiness, including quality gates for testing, security, and performance, operational runbooks, observability coverage, and rollback or mitigation plans.
- Establish, evolve, and enforce coding standards, testing frameworks, documentation practices, security controls, observability, and responsible AI practices to support maintainability and scalability.
- Conduct thorough peer code and pull-request reviews, including AI-generated code; evaluate test plans and unit test scripts for correctness, quality, reliability, security, performance, maintainability, and adherence to approved patterns.
- Actively design, develop, modify, integrate, maintain, and troubleshoot applications and services across front-end, back-end, cloud, and DevOps; lead complex or high-risk implementations and model best practices in coding, testing, debugging, and performance optimization.
- Own unit testing strategy, test automation, and AI evaluation coverage to meet quality gates consistently and prevent defects.
- Improve CI/CD pipelines, build and infrastructure automation, DevSecOps practices, release automation, and AI-assisted development workflows to improve deployment frequency and developer productivity.
- Collaborate with Product Owners, QA, Designers, and Scrum Masters to co-create user stories, define acceptance criteria, refine the backlog, and balance technical feasibility, testability, and business priorities; support timely decisions on scope changes.
- Own the technical response to production issues; lead triage, investigation, debugging, mitigation, and service restoration, coordinating cross-team support and escalation as required.
- Lead root-cause analysis for pod-owned incidents and defects; support post-release performance tuning and drive corrective and preventive actions, ensuring operational learnings become backlog items that are completed.
- Establish and maintain clear, accurate, and up-to-date technical and prompt documentation for new and updated software to support maintainability, onboarding, and operational support.
- Monitor and improve delivery and engineering metrics, including defect rates, pull-request lead time, test coverage, deployment frequency, rollback frequency, and reliability indicators; use commit velocity in context alongside quality and delivery measures to guide improvement actions.
- Lead and mentor software engineering teams across the full stack through pairing, feedback, and hands-on guidance; foster craftsmanship, accountability, continuous learning, innovation, collaboration, and psychological safety without formal people management accountability.
- Drive the responsible adoption of emerging technologies, including generative AI, agentic systems, and AI-assisted development tools, within approved enterprise architecture, security, and responsible AI standards.
- Communicate technical concepts, design decisions, risks, and trade-offs clearly to technical and non-technical stakeholders to support alignment across teams.

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 software development experience in a production environment, including at least 2–3 years in a technical leadership role.
- Proven ability to lead and coach engineering teams across the full stack, make architectural decisions within approved enterprise guardrails, and uphold engineering standards and code quality; demonstrated experience with Agile methodologies, backlog management, cross-functional collaboration, technical prioritization, and accountability for sprint commitments and delivery outcomes.
- Deep hands-on expertise in modern programming languages and frameworks (e.g., React, React Native, Angular, Node.js, Java, NestJS), RESTful APIs, OpenAPI/Swagger, and integration patterns.
- Strong experience with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP), cloud-native architecture patterns, containers and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes), infrastructure automation, CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, and modern DevOps and DevSecOps practices.
- Experience with relational databases (e.g., PostgreSQL, MySQL) and/or NoSQL databases (e.g., MongoDB, Cassandra), with a solid understanding of data access frameworks, industry standards, and best practices for database integration and performance optimization.
- Strong communication skills and the ability to align technical decisions across teams, collaborate with technical and non-technical roles, and explain technical concepts to non-technical audiences.
- Demonstrate punctuality and dependability to support overall team success in a fast-paced environment.

Assets

- Experience with MuleSoft or other Java-based enterprise service buses (e.g., IBM IIB, Tibco).
- Exposure to API management platforms such as Apigee, IBM API Connect, or MuleSoft, and enterprise systems.
- Familiarity with generative AI, machine learning model integration, AI-assisted development tools, prompt design, or AI evaluation frameworks.
- Background in large-scale, regulated, or mission-critical environments; airline or travel industry experience with an understanding of domain-specific challenges and systems.
- Certifications in cloud architecture, Agile leadership, or security frameworks (e.g., AWS Certified Solutions Architect, Certified ScrumMaster, CISSP).

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.