Work Style: Hybrid (3 days in office)
Location city: Toronto or London
Number of Openings: 1
Anticipated Start Date: 4 weeks from the official offer day
End Date: 12 months duration
Contractor to work extra time or on-call: No
Role Title: Technical Lead
Reliability Clearance required: No
Any specific tools/skillset:
- 8+ years building and operating complex enterprise digital products, including experience as a Technical Lead, Staff Engineer or senior full-stack developer.
- Demonstrated full-stack depth: Strong, recent hands-on delivery in both modern front-end engineering and backend/service development; able to move confidently across layers rather than specializing in only one.
- Deep experience with TypeScript, React and Next.js, including component architecture, state management, server-side rendering, accessibility, responsive design and front-end performance.
- Strong backend engineering experience with Java and Spring Boot, including REST APIs, microservices, asynchronous processing, data access, automated testing and production troubleshooting.
- Experience designing and integrating REST, GraphQL and event-driven services using clear contracts, authentication, resiliency patterns and graceful failure handling.
- Hands-on experience establishing cloud infrastructure, containers, infrastructure as code using Terraform, source-control workflows and CI/CD pipelines. Azure experience is preferred; Kubernetes and AWS experience are valuable.
- Strong quality-engineering capability, including test driven development, defining test strategy and automation across unit, component, contract, API, integration, end-to-end, accessibility, performance and security testing.
- Practical use of AI-assisted engineering tools - such as Claude Code, GitHub Copilot or comparable tools - to accelerate software delivery, testing, debugging and documentation within approved security and code-review controls.
- Hands-on experience delivering AI/ML-enabled product features using modern model platforms and frameworks, including retrieval, prompt engineering, structured outputs, tool use, evaluation, guardrails and production monitoring.
- Experience building reusable platform capabilities or modernizing fragmented applications while improving delivery speed, maintainability, reliability and customer outcomes.
Additional enterprise experience
- Experience with API gateways, Kafka or comparable event platforms, headless content, personalization, feature flags, experimentation, analytics, caching and relational or document databases.
- Ability to integrate CIAM (Okta Auth0), entitlement, consent, privacy, security and audit controls into end-to-end solutions in a regulated environment.
- Strong observability practice using logs, metrics, distributed tracing and alerting; familiarity with OpenTelemetry, Azure Monitor/Application Insights or comparable tooling.
- Working knowledge of secure software supply chains, dependency management, secrets management and controls for AI-assisted development.
- Experience in financial services, insurance or another complex regulated environment is preferred.
Role profile description:
Canada Life is building an Enterprise Digital Strategy and Delivery team to create simpler, connected and intelligent experiences for customers and the people who support them. We are looking for a hands-on Technical Lead and Senior Full-Stack Engineer who can build across the front end, back end, experience engine and AI/ML layers - and establish the engineering foundations required to deliver them reliably.
In this role, you will remain hands on across the full technology stack - from React/Next.js user experiences and experience orchestration to Java/Spring Boot services, APIs, Kafka events and data integration using REST API via Apigee. You will also be able to establish cloud infrastructure, development
environments and CI/CD pipelines, working with enterprise platform teams where shared services or controls are involved.
Success means shipping secure, accessible and resilient journeys end to end; increasing reuse and delivery speed; embedding quality automation throughout the engineering lifecycle; and using approved AI engineering tools to improve productivity without compromising accountability, security or code quality.
What you will do
- Design, code, test and deploy production capabilities across React/Next.js front ends, experience orchestration, Java/Spring Boot services, APIs, events and supporting data stores. Experience with using UML.
- Create reusable components and orchestration services that assemble content, customer context, data, decisions and actions into consistent, personalized journeys.
- Configure cloud infrastructure, development environments, infrastructure as code and CI/CD pipelines; partner with enterprise platform teams while remaining hands on in implementation and troubleshooting.
- Implement automated unit, component, API, integration, end-to-end, accessibility, performance and security testing, with quality gates embedded in delivery pipelines.
- Apply approved AI coding tools such as Claude Code to understand codebases, generate and refactor code, create tests, diagnose defects and automate routine development work - while maintaining human review, secure-development controls and accountability for every change.
- Develop AI-assisted and agentic product features, including retrieval, prompt engineering, structured outputs, tool integration using MCP, agent to agent interaction using MCP, RAG, evaluation, guardrails, human oversight and production monitoring. Experience using AI agent frameworks like LangGraph, CrewAI, MS Agent Framework.
- Establish shared UI patterns, design-system components, service templates, experience APIs and integration patterns that reduce duplication across role-based experiences.
- Define and enforce coding, API, accessibility, testing, security, documentation, observability and operational-readiness standards through working examples, reviews and automated controls. Work effectively with Solution Architects to deliver desired business and technology outcomes.
- Instrument services and journeys, diagnose issues across the stack and work with platform teams to resolve root causes and improve reliability.
- Lead design reviews and technical spikes, recommend practical build, buy or reuse decisions, and coach developers through pairing and high-quality code reviews.
How you work
- You stay close to the code and use working software to resolve ambiguity.
- You put the end-to-end customer outcome ahead of a single system, channel or line of business.
- You balance speed with security, reliability, accessibility, maintainability and cost.
- You communicate decisions and trade-offs clearly to engineers, product partners, architects and senior stakeholders.
- You challenge duplication and unnecessary complexity, while helping teams move from discussion to delivery.
