Development Lead - Air 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.

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.

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 design authority for the mobile platform and the primary delivery execution authority within enterprise architectural guardrails; define and enforce mobile architecture patterns and standards, and elevate enterprise-level or cross-domain decisions to Enterprise Architecture and leadership.

Drive readiness for production releases, including completion of quality gates (tests, security checks, performance, accessibility), phased/staged rollouts with halt criteria, runbooks/operational documentation, observability coverage, and mitigation plans that account for shipped app binaries that cannot be rolled back.

Uphold and enforce engineering standards for coding, testing, documentation, security, accessibility, observability, and responsible AI practices across the mobile application.

Champion high-quality peer code reviews, including AI-generated code, focusing on maintainability, performance, reliability, security and adherence to approved patterns.

Lead and support complex or high-risk feature implementations, balancing delivery timelines with technical quality and operational risk.

Own the testing strategy (unit, integration, UI/end-to-end, API contract, performance and device/OS compatibility), test automation, and AI evaluation coverage to ensure quality gates are consistently met and defects are prevented.

Enhance CI/CD pipeline efficiency for mobile and backend, build automation and code signing, 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 mobile application production issues; coordinate triage, restore service, and communicate status and mitigation to stakeholders.

Lead root cause analysis (RCA) for mobile application incidents/defects and drive corrective and preventive actions; ensure learnings are translated into backlog items and completed.

Establish and maintain clear,…