Senior Lead Developer

Position Overview

We are seeking an experienced Senior AWS Developer / Technical Lead to join the Captivate project team. In this role, you will lead the design, architecture, and hands-on execution of scalable backend services leveraging cloud-native AWS technologies and serverless architectures.

Beyond core technical delivery, this is a pivotal leadership role requiring a strong mentorship mindset. You will serve as a technical beacon - actively guiding junior and mid-level developers, driving architectural best practices, enforcing code quality, and helping the team evolve alongside modern engineering paradigms, including AI-assisted development tools.

Key Responsibilities

• Technical Leadership & Mentorship: Guide, coach, and elevate junior and mid-level team members through continuous code reviews, pair programming, architectural alignment, and technical career mentorship.
• Serverless & Cloud Architecture: Design, build, optimize, and maintain highly scalable, resilient, and fault-tolerant backend microservices and serverless workflows on AWS.
• Database & Data Management: Architect, query, tune, and manage relational and non-relational database systems (PostgreSQL, Aurora, DynamoDB), ensuring high performance, proper indexing, secure connectivity, and cost optimization.
• Security & IAM Management: Enforce robust AWS security practices across all cloud resources, including fine-grained IAM roles, cross-account access policies, network isolation, KMS encryption, and secure API integration.
• DevOps & Observability: Set up end-to-end monitoring, logging, and observability pipelines using AWS CloudWatch to efficiently diagnose, debug, and resolve performance bottlenecks and operational issues.
• Version Control & Governance: Oversee daily Git workflows, branching strategies, rebasing, pull request governance, and conflict resolution.
• AI Tool Integration: Champion the pragmatic adoption of AI-assisted tools (e.g., GitHub Copilot, Rovo) within the development lifecycle, applying prompt engineering and AI-assisted workflows responsibly while mitigating risks like hallucinations.

Required Technical Skills & Expertise

1. Demonstrated Seniority & Tenure

• Proven track record of progression in senior technical roles with long-term responsibility for architecture, hands-on delivery, and complex troubleshooting (rather than purely managerial tenure).
• Hands-on problem solver capable of articulating past architectural trade-offs, real-world deployment challenges, edge-case troubleshooting, and production failures from direct experience.

2. AWS & Cloud Infrastructure (Serverless Architecture)

Deep, practical, hands-on development, operational, and troubleshooting expertise across core AWS services:

• Compute & Orchestration: AWS Lambda, AWS Step Functions, Amazon ECS.
• APIs & Messaging: Amazon API Gateway, Amazon SNS, Amazon SQS.
• Databases: PostgreSQL (RDS / Aurora) and Amazon DynamoDB (schema design, query optimization, indexing, database connectivity, authentication, access control, and troubleshooting).
• Document Processing: AWS Textract.
• Security & Access Control: Advanced understanding of AWS KMS, IAM roles, cross-account access, and security best practices for S3, API Gateway, SQS, databases, and Lambda.
• Observability: Mastery of Amazon CloudWatch for debugging, log analysis, custom metrics, and system alerting.

3. Node.js & TypeScript Development

• Strong fluency in Node.js and TypeScript fundamentals.
• Practical expertise in backend CRUD development, RESTful API architecture, and popular Node.js libraries/frameworks.
• Mastery of asynchronous programming constructs (async/await, Promises), understanding when and why to apply specific patterns.
• Deep understanding of memory/performance tuning, inline functions, functional array operations, error-handling strategies, and operational fault tolerance.

4. Version Control & Git Operations

• Expert command of standard Git workflows, including branching models, pull request governance, complex rebasing, interactive conflict resolution, and code merging best practices.

5. AI Concepts & Engineering Literacy

• Practical experience working with AI developer assistants (e.g., GitHub Copilot, Atlassian Rovo, or similar tools).
• Working comprehension of core AI/LLM concepts, including context windows, hallucinations, and effective prompt engineering.
• Strategic understanding of when to leverage AI for problem-solving - and when traditional engineering logic should prevail.

Qualifications & Attributes

• Mentorship Orientation: Natural inclination to train, upskill, and lead junior talent while establishing clean engineering standards for the team.
• Financial Services Experience: Prior experience with a Top 5 Canadian Bank or similar enterprise banking/financial domain architectures is strongly preferred.
• Certifications (Bonus): AWS Certified Solutions Architect or AWS Certified Developer (Associate / Professional).