Internal Communications & Engagement Specialist

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)

Our client is seeking an experienced, people-first Director of Engineering to lead and scale its software engineering organization while driving a significant modernization of its technology platform. This is a high-impact leadership role combining people management, architectural strategy, engineering operations, and hands‑on technical direction.

The Director will oversee the full engineering team across front‑end, back‑end, and full‑stack development while helping transform a complex technology environment into a more unified, scalable, and maintainable platform. The successful candidate will bring a strong development foundation, genuine curiosity for technology, and the leadership presence to build a high‑performing engineering culture while tackling technical debt, infrastructure complexity, and modernization initiatives.

Key Responsibilities

Engineering Leadership & People Management

• 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.

Strategic Modernization & Engineering Roadmap

• Define and execute a modernization roadmap that converts complex technical debt and architectural improvements into clear, achievable priorities.
• 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.

Cloud Infrastructure, FinOps & Reliability

• Provide strategic and technical leadership over AWS infrastructure and cloud architecture.
• Identify opportunities to improve infrastructure efficiency and reduce unnecessary cloud spend.
• Partner with DevOps teams to strengthen Infrastructure as Code practices using technologies such as Terraform, CloudFormation, 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.

Developer Experience & Operational Excellence

• Improve developer tooling, workflows, and local development environments to reduce friction and accelerate delivery.
• Standardise 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 prioritise 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.

Just as importantly, they are an engaged and approachable people leader who enjoys mentoring engineers, improving team performance, challenging existing assumptions, and building an environment where people are excited to create and improve technology.

What Will Make You Stand Out

• Demonstrated success modernising complex legacy platforms or consolidating fragmented codebases and services.
• Experience leading engineering teams through cloud modernisation, containerisation, and Infrastructure as Code initiatives.
• Proven success optimising AWS infrastructure and reducing unnecessary cloud costs.
• Experience with Docker, ECS/EKS, CI/CD, Terraform, CloudFormation, or comparable technologies.
• A genuine passion for technology, experimentation, and continuous learning.
• Previous engineering leadership within SaaS, high‑volume eCommerce, domain registration, web hosting, or comparable digital platforms.
• Experience evaluating or implementing modern or headless CMS platforms.
• Practical experience introducing AI‑powered tools into software development workflows.

AI may be used to support certain administrative aspects of our recruitment process. However, all applications and resumes are reviewed by qualified human reviewers, and all screening and hiring decisions are made solely by the hiring team.

The posted salary range reflects expected compensation for this role in accordance with Ontario pay transparency requirements. Actual compensation will be determined based on the successful candidate’s experience, skills, and qualifications and may fall anywhere within the range.