Senior Technical Lead

Who you are

• At least 8 years of professional software engineering experience, with the majority in C# and .NET in production environments
• Recognised depth in .NET Core and ASP.NET Core - you have owned non-trivial services end to end and can reason about the runtime, not just the framework surface
• Expert-level Entity Framework Core, including migrations, query performance tuning, and knowing when to drop to raw SQL
• Deep understanding of asynchronous and concurrent programming in .NET, including async/await pitfalls, cancellation, and thread-pool behaviour
• At least 2 years leading engineering teams, with direct experience managing, mentoring, and developing engineers
• Demonstrated ability to design and deliver within an existing architecture, including reading unfamiliar codebases quickly and respecting established patterns
• Experience leading a dedicated or embedded delivery team inside a client's environment, processes, and repositories
• Track record running sprint delivery without a separate delivery manager - refinement through retrospective
• Production experience with a workflow orchestration engine (Temporal strongly preferred; Cadence, Camunda, or Step Functions considered)
• Strong grasp of event-driven architecture and pub/sub messaging patterns
• Practical experience implementing authentication and authorization for multi-tenant or role-sensitive applications using OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Connect
• Strong relational data modelling skills in PostgreSQL, with an understanding of when analytical workloads justify a separate store
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines and release process, ideally in GitLab
• Confidence communicating technical decisions directly to non-technical client stakeholders
• Must be located in British Columbia, Canada
• Working fluency in Next.js, React, and TypeScript - enough to review frontend code and unblock the team
• Experience leading teams that include embedded BA and QA capability, rather than developers only
• SaaS product delivery experience, particularly through a pilot-to-GA transition
• Hands-on Temporal experience, including workflow versioning and testing strategies
• Familiarity with fine-grained authorization models (Zanzibar-style / ReBAC) beyond OpenFGA specifically
• Experience with ClickHouse schema design, materialized views, or high-cardinality analytics
• Background in Domain-Driven Design and bounded context definition
• Experience with CQRS and event sourcing patterns
• Experience with Canadian public-sector or education data privacy requirements (PIPEDA, provincial FIPPA), including data residency considerations
• Consulting or agency experience delivering to external clients
• Experience running Jira Service Management as part of a support or run model
• You are a pragmatic engineer who makes decisions with incomplete information, documents the reasoning, and revisits them when the evidence changes
• You lead by raising the capability of the people around you, and you would rather ship a well-understood system than a clever one nobody else can maintain
• You treat a feature as incomplete until it is tested, documented, and supportable - finishing the code is the middle of the job, not the end

What the job involves

• As Technical Lead, you will be the senior .NET authority on a dedicated, cross-functional scrum team building a modern operational SaaS platform for K-12 education
• The platform helps school divisions automate administrative workflows, manage information across their organization, and surface operational insight - which in practice means long-running, multi-step business processes, heavy integration between systems, and reporting that has to hold up under scrutiny from district administrators
• Your team operates as an embedded extension of the client's product and engineering organization, not as an external group receiving isolated tickets
• It owns assigned product services end-to-end: analysis, planning, implementation, quality assurance, documentation, and release readiness
• The client sets product direction and owns architecture and engineering standards; your team is accountable for converting prioritized objectives into production-ready functionality without needing day-to-day coordination
• That means you will be working inside an established codebase and an established set of standards, influencing them through implementation plans and evidence rather than unilateral redesign
• This is a manager-level role. Alongside deep technical ownership, you will lead a team that includes embedded business analysis and QA capability - setting expectations, developing people, running sprint delivery, and representing the technical position directly to client stakeholders
• Depth in C# and .NET Core is the primary bar for this role: you should be the person the team escalates to on runtime behaviour, async correctness, EF Core query performance, and service design
• The platform is moving from pilot deployments toward general availability, so decisions you make need to survive real multi-tenant load
• Leading a cross-functional scrum team - developers, business analysis, and QA - accountable end-to-end for assigned product services and feature areas
• Writing and reviewing production C# and .NET Core code daily, and setting the standard for what good looks like in the codebase
• Working within the client's established architecture and engineering standards, and influencing them through implementation plans and evidence rather than unilateral decisions
• Producing technical analysis and implementation plans for significant changes, ahead of development starting
• Designing Temporal workflow implementations - activity boundaries, retry and compensation strategy, idempotency, and workflow versioning
• Implementing event-driven integration against defined pub/sub contracts, and flagging where contracts need to change
• Implementing authorization against OpenFGA policies and Keycloak-backed OAuth 2.0 / OpenID Connect flows in a multi-tenant context
• Working across PostgreSQL transactional models and ClickHouse reporting data within the client's data architecture
• Diagnosing and resolving performance issues across the .NET stack - EF Core query plans, connection pooling, async/await misuse, memory and allocation behaviour
• Owning the team's sprint delivery - refinement, planning, review, and retrospective - without the client needing to act as delivery coordinator
• Ensuring merge requests are small and reviewable, peer review is substantive, and CodeRabbit and pipeline feedback is addressed rather than waved through
• Holding the team to a definition of done that includes requirements validation, automated test coverage, documentation, release readiness, and supportability
• Owning post-release stabilization and defect resolution for recently delivered work
• Escalating risks, dependencies, and missing business decisions early
• Line-managing and mentoring engineers - goal setting, performance feedback, career development, and technical onboarding
• Partnering with client product and engineering stakeholders on trade-offs, sequencing, and feasibility
• Technologies:
• Core: C#, .NET Core, ASP.NET Core, Entity Framework Core, worker services, asynchronous processing
• APIs: REST, OpenAPI/Swagger, API versioning strategies
• Orchestration and Integration: Temporal workflows, integration services, event-driven pub/sub
• Data: PostgreSQL, ClickHouse, relational data modelling, reporting and analytics data
• Identity and Authorization: Keycloak, OpenFGA, OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, SSO, role- and policy-based authorization
• Testing: xUnit/NUnit, Moq, Testcontainers, unit, integration and API testing, Playwright end-to-end testing
• Engineering and Collaboration: GitLab, GitLab CI/CD, CodeRabbit automated code review, Jira, Jira Product Discovery, Jira Service Management, Confluence
• Frontend context: Next.js, React, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS, Shadcn/UI, component-driven development