Development Manager (Back-end Systems)

Joining Air Canada is about joining a Canadian symbol, Air Canada recently voted best airline in North America. Take your career to new heights by joining our innovative and diverse team at the forefront of passenger air transport.

Join Air Canada — an iconic Canadian brand and the top-ranked airline in North America — as we continue to evolve our digital platforms to support essential customer and operational experiences.

The Development Manager is a hands-on technical leader who sets technical direction, oversees sprint execution, and drives results within an agile development team. This role is responsible for technical solution design, delivery predictability, code quality, and deployment readiness, ensuring solutions align with enterprise architecture, engineering standards, and business goals.

The Development Manager provides day-to-day technical direction through implementation coordination, coaching, and active contribution. The Development Manager is the primary implementation authority within approved architectural constraints: escalating design decisions outside defined patterns and ensuring operational learnings are incorporated into the backlog.

Let your career take flight by joining a team that is redefining the digital passenger experience and stands at the forefront of the global air transport industry.

Responsibilities:

• Lead sprint commitments, daily execution, delivery predictability, and team results; ensure stories and tasks are well-defined, estimated, sequenced, and delivered while proactively managing scope, dependencies, technical priorities, and trade-offs.
• Break down complex requirements into clear technical tasks, analyze cross-system interactions and dependencies, anticipate risks, and guide implementation and validation.
• Lead technical solution design and own implementation architectural decisions within approved constraints, ensuring alignment with enterprise technology standards and long-term product vision; evaluate scalability, performance, security, maintainability, and design trade-offs.
• Lead and review the development of detailed design specifications for clarity, feasibility, and architectural compliance; apply approved modern patterns including microservices, serverless, and component-based modular architecture, securing tech lead approval for high-risk or non-standard designs.
• Define and evolve the development team’s technical strategy, implementation approaches, integration strategies, and engineering practices in line with enterprise standards; participate in cross-team initiatives to promote consistent technical guidelines across teams and platforms.
• Act as the primary implementation technical authority within the team; apply architectural patterns and engineering standards, make technical decisions within established constraints, and escalate to the tech lead regarding shared services, multi-team designs, or global enterprise alignment.
• Ensure readiness for production releases, including quality criteria for testing, security, performance, operational procedures, observability coverage, and rollback or mitigation plans.
• Establish, evolve, and enforce coding standards, testing frameworks, documentation practices, security controls, observability practices, and responsible AI practices to foster maintainability and scalability.
• Conduct thorough peer code and merge request reviews, including AI-generated code; evaluate test plans and unit test scripts for correctness, quality, reliability, security, performance, maintainability, and compliance with approved patterns.
• Actively participate in the design, development, modification, integration, maintenance, and troubleshooting of applications and services across front-end, back-end, cloud, and DevOps environments; lead complex or high-risk implementations and model best practices in coding, testing, debugging, and performance optimization.
• Establish unit testing, test automation, and AI coverage assessment strategies to meet quality criteria and prevent defects.
• Improve integration and deployment pipelines, build and infrastructure automation, DevSecOps practices, release automation, and AI-assisted development processes to increase deployment frequency and developer productivity.
• Collaborate with Product Owners, Quality Assurance, designers, and Scrum facilitators to jointly elaborate user stories, define acceptance criteria, refine the backlog, and balance technical feasibility, testability, and business priorities; foster rapid decision-making regarding scope changes.
• Own production technical troubleshooting; lead triage, investigation, debugging, mitigation, and service restoration, coordinating support from other teams and escalations as needed.
• Lead root cause analysis of incidents and defects within the development team; contribute to post-release performance optimization and drive corrective and preventative measures, ensuring operational learnings are incorporated into the backlog and completed.
• Establish and maintain clear, accurate, and current technical and operational documentation for new and updated software to facilitate maintenance, onboarding, and operational support.
• Monitor and improve delivery and engineering metrics, including defect rates, merge request lead times, test coverage, deployment frequency, rollback frequency, and reliability metrics; interpret code commit cadence contextually alongside quality and delivery metrics to guide improvement initiatives.
• Lead and mentor software engineering teams across technology layers through pair programming, feedback, and hands-on guidance; foster a culture of professional rigor, accountability, continuous learning, innovation, collaboration, and psychological safety without direct people management responsibilities.
• Promote the responsible adoption of emerging technologies, including generative AI, agentic AI systems, and AI-assisted development tools, in compliance with approved enterprise architecture, security, and responsible AI standards.
• Clearly communicate technical concepts, design decisions, risks, and trade-offs to technical and non-technical stakeholders to drive cross-team alignment.

Personal Qualities

• Inspire and energize engineering teams with high enthusiasm and a culture of excellence and accountability.
• Demonstrate an innovative and forward-thinking mindset, exploring emerging technologies and non-traditional solutions for complex challenges.
• Build and maintain a culture of trust, transparency, and psychological safety to enable open dialogue and diverse perspectives.
• Challenge assumptions and the status quo with curiosity and courage to drive continuous improvement and team performance.
• Balance strategic vision with hands-on technical guidance, ensuring alignment between business goals and technical execution.
• Model integrity, resilience, and a commitment to mentoring colleagues to reach their full potential.

Qualifications

Mandatory

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science or a related field.
• At least five years of software development experience in a production environment, including at least two to three years in a technical leadership role.
• Proven ability to lead and mentor cross-functional engineering teams, make architectural decisions within approved enterprise constraints, and enforce engineering and code quality standards; demonstrated experience with Agile methods, backlog management, cross-functional collaboration, technical prioritization, and accountability for sprint commitments and delivery results.
• Deep technical expertise and hands-on experience with modern programming languages and development 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) or NoSQL databases (e.g., MongoDB, Cassandra), or both, along with a strong understanding of data access frameworks, industry standards, and best practices in database integration and performance optimization.
• Excellent communication skills and the ability to align technical decisions across teams, collaborate with technical and non-technical stakeholders, and explain technical concepts to non-technical audiences.
• Proven punctuality and reliability to drive overall team success in a fast-paced environment.

Assets

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

Employment Conditions:

Candidates must be eligible to work in the country concerned at the time an offer of employment is presented and are responsible for obtaining necessary work permits, visas, or other authorizations. Proof of eligibility must be provided prior to the start date.

Language Requirements

All things being equal, 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 workplace that highlights the unique contribution of our employees to our business success.

As an equal opportunity employer, we encourage diverse applications to build a workforce that is varied and representative of our customers and the communities where we live and serve.

Air Canada thanks all applicants for their interest, but only those selected for an interview will be contacted.