Development Manager - Application Development

Belonging to Air Canada is about belonging to a Canadian icon, 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 critical operational and customer experiences.

The Development Manager is a seasoned technical leader who adopts a hands-on approach and defines technical direction, oversees sprint execution, and ensures the achievement of results within an agile development team. The incumbent is responsible for technical solution design, delivery predictability, code quality, and deployment readiness, ensuring that solutions align with enterprise architecture, engineering standards, and business objectives.

The Development Manager provides day-to-day technical leadership through implementation coordination, coaching, and active contribution. The Development Manager is the primary authority responsible for implementation within approved architectural constraints: they escalate design decisions that fall outside defined models to their superiors and ensure that lessons learned from operations are integrated into the task repository.

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

Responsibilities

• Lead sprint commitments, ensure delivery predictability, and guarantee expected outcomes for the team; proactively manage scope, dependencies, and trade-offs to achieve agreed-upon goals.
• Lead the execution of current sprints, ensuring stories and tasks are well-defined, estimated, sequenced, and delivered in accordance with agreed commitments.
• Break down complex requirements into clear technical tasks, anticipate risks early, and guide the team through implementation and validation.
• Lead the design of technical solutions meeting complex requirements, evaluating design options, technical trade-offs, dependencies, scalability, performance, security, and maintainability.
• Define and communicate technical approaches, design patterns, integration strategies, and implementation standards to guide development within the team.
• Act as the primary technical authority for all teams; define implementation approaches, apply architectural models and engineering standards, make technical decisions within established boundaries, and escalate decisions requiring enterprise-wide alignment.
• Ensure readiness for production deployments, notably by ensuring compliance with quality criteria (testing, security checks, performance), setting up operational guides and operational documentation, observability coverage, and rollback and mitigation plans.
• Respect and enforce technical standards regarding coding, testing, documentation, security, observability, and responsible AI practices within the team.
• Foster high-quality peer code reviews, including for AI-generated code, with an emphasis on maintainability, performance, reliability, and adherence to approved models.
• Lead and support the implementation of complex or high-risk features, striking a balance between delivery deadlines, technical quality, and operational risk.
• Implement a unit testing, test automation, and AI coverage evaluation strategy to ensure consistent compliance with quality criteria and prevent defects.
• Improve the efficiency of continuous integration and deployment pipelines, implement release creation automation and AI-assisted development workflows to increase deployment frequency and developer productivity.
• Collaborate with Product Owners, QA leads, designers, and Scrum facilitators to ensure clarity, feasibility, testability, and timely decision-making regarding project scope modifications.
• Assume technical responsibility for production-related issues; lead triage, analysis, impact mitigation, and service restoration, and coordinate with other technical teams when hierarchical recourse or cross-team support is needed.
• Conduct root cause analyses for incidents and defects falling under the team's responsibility and implement corrective and preventive measures; ensure that lessons learned translate into product backlog entries that are carried to completion.
• Establish and maintain clear, accurate, and up-to-date technical and operational documentation to facilitate maintenance, onboarding of new employees, and operational support.
• Monitor and improve delivery and quality metrics, such as defect rates, pull request processing times, deployment frequency, rollback frequency, and reliability indicators; leverage data to implement improvement measures.
• Provide day-to-day technical coaching and mentoring through pair work, feedback, and guidance; foster a culture focused on craftsmanship, accountability, collaboration, and continuous improvement.
• Design, develop, modify, integrate, maintain, and troubleshoot software applications and services.
• Write, read, review, test, debug, and fix software code to add new features and improve existing systems.
• Analyze technical requirements, dependencies, and system interactions, and recommend modifications or implementation approaches.
• Perform peer code reviews and examine integration requests, providing feedback on accuracy, maintainability, performance, reliability, security, and standards compliance.
• Provide technical support for integrations, analyze failures and production issues, implement fixes, and validate solutions through testing.
• Write and maintain technical documentation for new and updated software.

Personal Qualities

• Inspire and energize Engineering teams by demonstrating great enthusiasm and fostering a culture of excellence and empowerment.
• Demonstrate an innovative and forward-looking mindset, constantly exploring emerging technologies and non-traditional solutions to tackle complex challenges.
• Establish and maintain a culture of trust, transparency, and psychological safety to enable open dialogue that encourages diverse viewpoints.
• Challenge assumptions and the status quo with curiosity and courage to drive continuous improvement and increase team performance.
• Ensure a balance between strategic vision and practical technical guidance, ensuring alignment between business goals and technical execution.
• Lead by example with 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 (5) years of software development experience in a production environment.
• Proven experience leading project implementation within agile teams, with responsibility for sprint commitments, implementation results, and code quality. Solid hands-on expertise with modern programming languages and frameworks (e.g., Java, Node.js, React, React Native, Angular, NestJS).
• Strong experience using continuous integration and deployment pipelines, automated testing, and modern DevOps practices.
• Proven ability to enforce engineering standards, ensure code quality, and support sprint-level delivery commitments.
• Excellent communication skills and ability to collaborate effectively with both technical and non-technical colleagues.
• Demonstrated punctuality and reliability to drive overall team success in a fast-paced environment.

Assets

• Experience with AI-assisted development tools, prompt engineering, or AI evaluation frameworks.
• Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP) and cloud-native architecture models.
• Knowledge of API platforms, integration technologies, or enterprise systems.
• Experience acquired in large-scale, regulated environments or mission-critical operations.

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 work permits, visas, or other necessary authorizations. Proof of eligibility must be provided before 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 ensure a varied workforce representative of our customers and the communities where we live and offer our services.