Vice President of Engineering and Development

The Company

Our client is a Canadian technology company based in the Greater Toronto Area. With a 10 year history, the company is focused on scaling and growth.

The Position

Vice President, Engineering and Development

Position Mandate

The Vice President, Engineering & Development provides oversight and direction for the company's software development lifecycle and storage infrastructure, leading the engineering team, to ensure a robust, scalable product to support achievement of the company’s business goals and objectives.

Reporting to the newly appointed CEO, and a member of the Senior Leadership Team, the role is pivotal in transforming the engineering culture, enhancing product quality, and enabling the company to achieve its business objectives. As the most senior technical leader for the company, the Vice President, Engineering & Development provides an informed and knowledgeable voice to facilitate strategic technology and market expansion choices and decisions.

Location

Hybrid position located in the company’s head office in the Greater Toronto Area.

Position Contributions and Impact

Strategic Direction: Establishing a clear technical vision that aligns with business objectives, focusing on scaling and expanding the company’s market share. This includes deciding on technological pivots or enhancements that anticipate market needs.

Quality Control Improvement: Addressing existing quality control issues by introducing automation testing, rigorous testing protocols, improving code quality through best practice software engineering approaches, reviews, and establishing a culture of pride of ownership and excellence.

Team Development: Optimizing team structure to enhance capability and performance. This includes hiring key talents, providing training, and fostering a collaborative environment that encourages innovation.

Performance and Documentation Standards: Implementing and enforcing coding standards to ensure consistency, maintainability, documentation, and quality across all codebases. This would likely involve setting up a more formal code review process and continuous education for the team on best practices.

Backend Evolution and Improvements: Leading significant enhancements to the backend architecture to support scalability and performance demands, possibly evaluating and integrating relevant technologies where appropriate.

Testing Automation: Revitalizing the testing automation strategy allowing development owners to carry out early testing of their code, reduce manual testing burdens and improve release cycles, reliability, and bug tracking.

Documentation Practices: Developing comprehensive documentation practices to ensure that all team members and stakeholders understand the systems and processes well, which is vital for scaling and maintaining quality.

DevOps and Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD): Enhancing or implementing DevOps practices and CI/CD pipelines to streamline development workflows, improve deployment speeds, and minimize downtime.

Responsible for end-to-end architecture of the platform. This will include back-end, front-end, applications, and infrastructure.

Market Positioning and Growth: Through technological leadership and innovation, position the company to capture a larger share of the small to medium-sized market. This involves not just internal improvements but also external technology leadership and thought leadership in the industry.

Risk Management: Identifying potential technology risks and ensuring there are strategies in place to mitigate these risks, particularly as the company scales.

Communication with the CEO and Board: Regularly updating and advising the CEO and potentially the board on technological strategies, progress, and challenges. This ensures alignment and supports informed decision-making at the highest levels.

Compliancy: Ensure product is compliant with relevant data residency regulations and standards for jurisdictions in which it operates; in particular HIPPA (U.S. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) compliant, SOC 2 and 3 and future ISO needs.

The Candidate Profile

You’re a visionary tech leader that can lead a top-notch development team to deliver exceptional performance and growth in a scaling company. A skilled leader and manager, with depth of technical understanding, you have experienced growth and solved tough technical problems. You have a proven track record of implementing overdue and difficult changes and earn respect for your technical acumen. Resilient and grounded, you can operate at a strategic level without compromising on the details.

You thrive in an environment with hundreds of containers, large sharded multi-terabyte databases and petabytes of onstream storage. You have grown up with relational database management, networking and classic database design. You take ownership of code, guided by a belief in writing code that can be tested. You are willing to adopt and evolve an existing code base.

Experience, Skills and Knowledge

Leadership and Team Management: Ability to inspire, lead, and manage a team of engineers, software developers and infrastructure teams. This includes hiring, training, setting clear goals, and creating a productive work environment.

Strategic Planning and Vision: The VP should have a strong vision for the development of the application, aligning the engineering strategy with the business goals, and planning for scaling, maintenance, and new features.

Technical Expertise: Deep understanding of the technical aspects of the platform to make informed decisions and guide the team effectively; back-end and database experience is critical. Experience creating, maintaining and scaling “high-usage” applications is highly desirable, as is experience with multiple language paradigms.

Problem-Solving Skills: Must be adept at troubleshooting and resolving issues that arise during development, deployment, and in production.

Communication: Excellent communication skills are essential for liaising between different stakeholders, and the engineering team.

Project Management: Experience with agile methodologies, sprint planning, resource allocation, and timeline management to ensure projects are completed on time and within budget.

Education: Undergraduate degree in software engineering, computer engineering, or compute science with a graduate degree preferred.

Critical Coding Competencies and Languages

Languages:

Significant depth of experience working in a PHP environment, ideally within the last 12 months; C++, C is crucial

JavaScript/TypeScript/Node.js Java, Swift iOS and Native Android; expertise in TypeScript and Native mobile application development is highly desirable

HTML/CSS; Web Frameworks, React Native, RESTful APIs and Grafana

Strong grounding in OOP, ORM, and asynchronous programming

Site Reliability and Infrastructure

Hardware storage and infrastructure, experience leading data centre operational team

Database Management:

Significant expertise in databases such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, and NoSQL

Cloud and DevOps:

AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud

Containerization and Orchestration Tools: Knowledge of Docker, Kubernetes, etc., for containerization and management of microservices architecture

CI/CD Pipelines: Must have implemented these from beginning to end

Familiarity with microservices implementation

Security:

Encryption and Authentication Protocols: Implementation and experience with how to apply security protocols and standards