Team Lead, Backend Engineering

ANVIL

8d•$122,500 - $162,500•Hybrid

About The Position

As a Team Lead, Backend Engineering, you will guide a team of backend engineers while remaining a meaningful technical contributor to the systems you help design and ship. This is a role for someone who has developed serious depth across the backend stack and is ready to grow their impact through the people and architecture around them, not just the code they write personally. The majority of your time will be directed toward your team: conducting code reviews, mentoring engineers across experience levels, upholding standards around data integrity, service design, and API quality, and supporting your direct reports through regular 1:1s, honest performance conversations, and deliberate career development. Your remaining time keeps you close to the technical work; contributing to architecturally significant services, shaping data contracts, informing decisions around streaming and database design, and ensuring your instincts stay current enough to lead with credibility. You will work closely with frontend lead, architecture, and product teams to ensure your team's services are reliable, well-documented, and designed to hold up under the demands of mission-critical operational environments. You will be the person your team looks to for technical direction, a clear quality bar, and the kind of candid and constructive guidance that helps them grow. This is a full-time position based in Ottawa / Remote. Eligible candidates must either possess or be eligible to obtain a Government of Canada Top Secret security clearance.

Requirements

Eligible for Government of Canada Top Secret security clearance
8–12 years of experience in backend engineering, with significant production-grade work in Python and SQL
Demonstrated experience leading or formally mentoring other engineers, whether through a prior lead role or a consistent track record of raising the quality and capability of those around them
Deep, hands-on experience designing and maintaining HTTP APIs (REST, gRPC), managing databases at production scale, and enforcing type consistency and data contracts across service boundaries (sufficient to review others' work with authority and coach engineers through complex problems)
Meaningful experience across real-time protocols (WebSocket, SSE) and event-driven systems (Kafka, Redpanda), with the architectural judgment to know when each pattern is the right tool.
Experience conducting code reviews as a primary quality gate (catching defects and shaping how a team thinks about service design, data modelling, consistency, and long-term maintainability)
A clear and considered approach to technical leadership: able to set architectural direction, communicate the reasoning behind it, and bring a team along without creating bottlenecks
Strong coaching instincts (able to read where each engineer is, what they need to progress, and how to deliver feedback that sticks)
Comfortable holding a high bar for backend quality
Excellent verbal and written communication skills, with the ability to represent your team's systems and technical decisions to frontend engineers, product stakeholders, and senior leadership alike
Proven ability to diagnose and resolve complex system and integration failures, and to use those moments as structured learning opportunities for the team

Nice To Haves

Experience with knowledge management systems, case management systems, or relevant defence industry applications
Familiarity with Agile/Scrum methodologies and experience helping a team operate effectively within sprint-based delivery cycles
Experience working in or closely with defence, public safety, or national security organizations
Familiarity with containerization and deployment tooling (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes)
Experience contributing to platform-level backend architecture decisions, including cross-service data contracts and API governance
Prior involvement in hiring processes, technical interviews, or onboarding programs for engineering teams
Exposure to observability practices including structured logging, metrics, and distributed tracing at a team-wide level

Responsibilities

Manage a team of backend engineers, serving as their primary point of support, accountability, and professional development
Conduct regular 1:1s focused on growth, blockers, feedback, and career trajectories
Provide honest, timely, and well-framed performance feedback; contribute to formal performance reviews and help engineers understand what meaningful progress looks like for them
Foster a team culture where high standards and psychological safety coexist
Own the code review process for your team's output, ensuring reviews are thorough, consistent, and serve as genuine learning moments rather than rubber stamps
Define and maintain backend coding standards, API design conventions, data modelling practices, and testing expectations across the team
Identify patterns in code quality issues and address them systematically
Serve as the escalation point for complex technical decisions within your team's domain
Contribute directly to architecturally significant services, complex data pipelines, or areas of the codebase where your experience and judgment add the most value
Stay close enough to the day-to-day technical work to review code with authority, support engineers through hard problems, and make well-grounded architectural recommendations
Lead the design of data contracts and shared API schemas in close collaboration with the Frontend Lead and data teams, ensuring changes are managed deliberately and without introducing cross-team breakage
Participate actively in sprint planning, daily standups, sprint reviews, and retrospectives
Represent your team's progress, capacity, and technical needs clearly to product and engineering leadership
Review and provide feedback on requirements, design documents, and specifications on behalf of your team
Work closely with cross-functional partners to maintain delivery standards without sacrificing the quality bar your team is held to