Engineering Lead 

Location: Toronto, Canada (5 days onsite)
Compensation: CAD $180,000–$220,000 (estimated range)
Employment: Full-time | Leadership position

About the Opportunity

We're partnering with a growing Canadian fintech company that's transforming how businesses manage international banking, payments, and financial operations.

The company is building a modern financial platform that enables businesses to manage multiple currencies, make international payments, access corporate financial tools, and streamline their financial operations.

We're looking for a hands-on Engineering Lead to take ownership of the engineering organization, driving technical execution, product quality, and team development.

This is an opportunity for someone who enjoys both building great software and leading talented engineers. You'll have significant influence over technical architecture, engineering practices, product development, and the adoption of AI-powered development tools.

Unlike traditional engineering management positions, this role requires someone who remains deeply involved in technical decisions and software development.

What You'll Own

Engineering Leadership & Delivery

• Lead a multidisciplinary engineering team of approximately 10 engineers across frontend, backend, mobile, and financial infrastructure.

• Own engineering execution across customer-facing applications, APIs, and core financial systems.

• Balance technical priorities, product improvements, platform reliability, and business objectives.

• Establish engineering standards that support scalability, reliability, and continuous delivery.

• Remain hands-on with architecture, technical problem-solving, and development when needed.

Product Engineering & Customer Experience

• Oversee the development and continuous improvement of web and mobile applications used by business customers.

• Collaborate with product and design stakeholders to deliver intuitive, reliable, and high-performing experiences.

• Ensure engineering decisions consider both technical quality and customer impact.

• Drive improvements in product performance, usability, and overall software quality.

Financial Systems & Platform Reliability

• Oversee backend services supporting financial transactions, payment processing, and third-party banking integrations.

• Maintain high standards for transaction accuracy, data integrity, and system reliability.

• Guide engineering decisions involving distributed systems, asynchronous workflows, reconciliation, and financial data consistency.

• Strengthen monitoring, incident response, and operational processes to proactively identify and resolve issues.

AI-Driven Engineering

AI is already an important part of the company's engineering workflow, and this role will help shape how it evolves.

• Lead the adoption and integration of AI coding agents into everyday engineering processes.

• Define how engineers and AI agents collaborate across development, testing, and maintenance.

• Establish quality assurance, security, and verification standards for AI-generated code.

• Identify opportunities to automate engineering workflows while maintaining reliability and accountability.

• Help engineers develop the skills and judgment needed to work effectively with AI-powered development tools.

People Leadership & Team Development

• Coach, mentor, and support engineers through regular feedback, career development, and technical guidance.

• Build a high-performance engineering culture focused on ownership, accountability, and continuous improvement.

• Lead hiring initiatives and help attract strong engineering talent.

• Encourage independent problem-solving, critical thinking, and effective collaboration.

• Foster an environment where engineers can move quickly without compromising quality.

What We're Looking For

Required Experience

• Proven experience as an Engineering Manager, Engineering Lead, Head of Engineering, or similar technical leadership role.

• Strong software engineering background with the ability to remain hands-on with coding, architecture, and technical decisions. No specific programming language preferred.

• Experience managing engineering teams and delivering complex, customer-facing software products.

• Broad technical understanding across backend systems, APIs, web applications, and ideally mobile development.

• Experience with transaction-sensitive or correctness-critical systems, such as payments, banking, financial infrastructure, billing, or trading platforms.

• Strong understanding of distributed systems, data consistency, third-party integrations, and production reliability.

• Demonstrated experience hiring, mentoring, and developing software engineers.

• Practical experience using AI coding assistants or autonomous coding agents in production engineering environments.

• Excellent communication, problem-solving, decision-making, and interpersonal skills.

• Ability to operate effectively in a fast-paced, product-driven environment with a relatively small engineering team.

Technical Environment

The engineering organization works with technologies and concepts including:

• Backend: Ruby, Ruby on Rails, REST APIs, distributed services.

• Databases: PostgreSQL, SQL, transactional data integrity.

• Workflow orchestration: Temporal or comparable asynchronous workflow technologies.

• Financial infrastructure: Payment processing, ledger systems, reconciliation, banking integrations.

• AI development: AI coding agents, Claude Code, MCP, automated development workflows.

• Engineering practices: CI/CD, monitoring, incident management, automated testing, and production reliability.

Experience with every technology listed is not required. Strong engineering fundamentals and the ability to adapt to different technologies are more important.

Nice to Have

• Experience in fintech, banking, payments, or financial technology products.

• Knowledge of double-entry accounting systems, cross-border payments, foreign exchange, or treasury operations.

• Familiarity with Canadian payment infrastructure.

• Exposure to financial compliance and security frameworks such as SOC 2 or PCI-DSS.

• Experience building internal AI tools or agent-based engineering infrastructure.

• Experience leading engineering teams in high-growth startups or established product companies.

• French language proficiency.

What Makes This Opportunity Interesting

• Real ownership: Lead engineering across both the customer-facing product and the underlying financial infrastructure.

• Hands-on leadership: Stay close to the technology while building and developing a strong engineering team.

• AI-first environment: Help define how AI agents and engineers work together in a modern software organization.

• High-impact systems: Work on products where reliability, financial accuracy, and customer trust are essential.

• Lean engineering culture: Join a team that values autonomy, technical judgment, and meaningful ownership over unnecessary complexity.

• Direct influence: Play a key role in shaping engineering standards, architecture, hiring, and technical direction.

Interview Process

The hiring process is designed to evaluate both technical expertise and leadership capabilities.

1. Initial conversation: Discussion about your background, leadership experience, and technical ownership.

2. Team and culture interview: Explore your management approach, communication style, and collaboration skills.

3. Practical onsite assessment: Spend time working alongside the engineering team in a real development environment. Work trial for 3 days in the office.

The practical assessment is expected to take approximately three days, with final details to be confirmed.

Location & Work Arrangement

This is a fully onsite position based in downtown Toronto, Canada, requiring attendance five days per week.

We're considering candidates already based in Toronto as well as those willing and able to relocate.

Remote or hybrid arrangements are not available for this position.