Director of Engineering

Position Title:

Director of Engineering

Salary & Benefits:

Approximately $200,000 base salary. Competitive benefits, professional development support, dedicated workspace, and onsite employee perks.

Position Status:
Current Vacancy

Location:

Ottawa, ON

Work Model:
Hybrid (4 days onsite, 1 day remote)

Directly lead, manage, and mentor a multidisciplinary engineering team, including intermediate and senior developers and technical leads. Conduct regular 1-on-1s, performance reviews, compensation discussions, and career development planning. Build an engineering culture centred on trust, accountability, technical excellence, curiosity, and continuous improvement. Own resource planning, team capacity, hiring strategy, and identification of technical skill gaps. Support developers through technical challenges using architectural discussions, code reviews, mentoring, and collaborative problem-solving.

Establish clear career paths and create an environment where engineers can grow professionally and technically.

Define and execute a modernization roadmap that converts complex technical debt and architectural improvements into clear, achievable priorities. Lead the transition from aging and fragmented systems toward modern, scalable Node.js, React, JavaScript/Type Script, and cloud-based architectures. Establish consistent engineering standards, governance, testing practices, and development conventions across teams. Balance short-term delivery requirements with longer-term architectural health and platform scalability. Partner with senior leadership to communicate technical priorities, investment requirements, risks, and business impact.

Lead the consolidation and rationalization of a large number of fragmented codebases and services. Simplify over-engineered or overly complex microservice environments into maintainable, scalable architectures. Modernize APIs, event-driven workflows, and distributed services supporting high-volume digital platforms. Guide database refactoring, data modelling improvements, and modern CMS integrations. Evaluate technical architecture with a pragmatic focus on maintainability, performance, scalability, and developer experience.

Provide strategic and technical leadership over AWS infrastructure and cloud architecture. Identify opportunities to improve infrastructure efficiency and reduce unnecessary cloud spend. Partner with Dev Ops teams to strengthen Infrastructure as Code practices using technologies such as Terraform, Cloud Formation, or CDK. Improve CI/CD pipelines, deployment reliability, and production stability. Establish stronger observability, monitoring, metrics, and alerting practices to reduce reactive firefighting and improve incident response.

Promote structured post-mortems and continuous learning following production incidents.

Improve developer tooling, workflows, and local development environments to reduce friction and accelerate delivery. Standardize automated testing across unit, integration, and regression testing. Strengthen release management practices and production quality controls. Collaborate closely with Product, Customer Support, and Marketing teams to identify and resolve customer-facing platform issues. Use operational data, support metrics, and telemetry to help prioritize engineering improvements. Evaluate and introduce AI-assisted engineering tools and automation where they can meaningfully improve developer productivity and operational efficiency.

The ideal candidate brings more than ten years of progressive software engineering experience, including at least four years of direct people-management responsibility as a Director of Engineering, Engineering Manager, Head of Engineering, or similar leader. They have progressed through hands-on software development and retain enough technical depth to participate credibly in architectural discussions, code-level debates, and modernization planning. They bring strong experience across modern JavaScript/Type Script environments, including Node.js

and React, along with familiarity with enterprise .NET/C# ecosystems. They have successfully led complex modernization initiatives involving legacy systems, cloud migrations, codebase consolidation, microservices, or platform refactoring and have practical…