Principal Technical Lead

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Air Canada is undertaking an ambitious workforce and engineering transformation to fundamentally change how software is designed, built, and delivered across the enterprise. A cornerstone of this transformation is the adoption of AI-first engineering practices, modern delivery models, and agentic tooling that materially improve developer productivity, speed to market, and operational outcomes.

The Principal Tech Lead will play a foundational role in the success of Air Canada’s IDD workforce transformation, with direct accountability for enabling and sustaining the cost reduction commitments tied to this initiative. By redefining engineering ways of working and embedding intelligent automation across the software development lifecycle, this role will help ensure that efficiency gains are real, measurable, and scalable.

As a senior, hands-on technical leader, the Principal Tech Lead will shape and operationalize these new practices across Air Canada’s Software and Platform Development teams. Working closely with the Senior Management Team, this role will translate transformation strategy into day-to-day engineering execution across customer, operations, and corporate domains-ensuring adoption, consistency, and long-term impact.

Responsibilities:

AI-First Engineering & Technical Leadership

• Lead by example in the adoption of AI-first and agentic engineering practices, embedding intelligent automation across the software development lifecycle.
• Act as a technical authority and practitioner, guiding teams on how to effectively use AI-enabled development tools for design, coding, testing, deployment, and operations.
• Prototype, evaluate, and operationalize emerging tools and frameworks that enhance developer productivity and delivery efficiency.

Hands-On Technical Direction

• Provide day-to-day technical leadership across multiple engineering teams, influencing design decisions and implementation approaches.
• Define and socialize technical standards, reference implementations, and best practices that support scalability, reliability, and maintainability.
• Review and guide critical designs and codebases, ensuring alignment with modern architecture and engineering principles.

Modern Ways of Working & Enablement

• Champion modern engineering practices-DevOps, CI/CD, platform engineering, and cloud-native delivery-within an AI-first operating model.
• Partner with Engineering and Platform leaders to embed new workflows, playbooks, and automation into team-level execution.
• Mentor Dev Leads and Tech Leads, developing technical depth, leadership capability, and a culture of continuous improvement.
• Collaborate with Workforce Transformation team to scales and distribute formal bootcamps and ways of working to ensure broad adoption and productivity gains across IDD.

Cross-Domain & Enterprise Impact

• Work across customer, operations, and corporate domains to ensure consistent application of engineering standards and tooling.
• Collaborate with Product, Data, Infrastructure, and Cybersecurity teams to deliver secure, scalable, and integrated solutions.
• Translate enterprise strategy into executable technical initiatives that drive business growth, operational efficiency, and cost reduction.

Stakeholder Collaboration

• Partner closely with Senior Management in Software & Platform Engineering, Digital Product and Platform Product teams to align technical execution with strategic priorities.
• Serve as a trusted technical advisor, helping leadership assess trade-offs, risks, and opportunities related to new technologies and delivery models.
• Support change management efforts by driving adoption and buy-in for new tools and ways of working.

Technology Innovation

• Drive technology innovation across frontend and backend engineering, continuously evaluating emerging frameworks, tools, and architectural approaches to modernize application development.
• Champion modern frontend architectures, including micro-frontends, reusable component libraries, design systems, server-side rendering and performance optimization.
• Drive innovation in backend engineering through modern application architectures, microservices, serverless computing, API-first design, event-driven systems, and distributed processing.
• Identify opportunities to leverage AI, automation, and intelligent development tools to accelerate frontend and backend development, improve code quality, and optimize engineering workflows.
• Establish reusable frameworks, shared libraries, reference implementations, and engineering standards to improve consistency, scalability, and developer productivity.
• Lead technical evaluations, proof of concepts, and adoption of emerging technologies, ensuring innovations translate into practical, scalable, and production-ready solutions.

Qualifications

Required

• 15+ years of experience in software engineering, with a strong track record as a senior engineer, tech lead, solution architect or principal-level contributor.
• Deep, hands-on expertise in modern application development and distributed systems (cloud-native services, APIs, event-driven architectures).
• Practical and proven experience using AI-assisted development tools, automation frameworks, or agentic workflows within engineering teams.
• Proven ability to lead technical change through influence, coaching, and example rather than authority alone.
• Strong communication skills with the ability to engage both engineers and senior leaders.
• Experience delivering systems across multiple domains (customer-facing, operational, and corporate platforms).
• Ability to lead by example through technical understanding and engineering capability.
• Deep familiarity with Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) such as Github Co-Pilot and Cursor.
• Demonstrate punctuality and dependability to support overall team success in a fast-paced environment.
• Strong experience in front end technologies : Angular/React, JavaScript, TypeScript, HTML5, CSS3, Responsive Web Architecture.
• Strong experience in backend technologies: Java/Node.js, REST APIs/GraphQL, Microservices.

Preferred

• Experience in large-scale, mission-critical environments such as aviation, transportation, or similarly complex industries.
• Exposure to platform engineering, internal developer platforms (IDPs), and developer experience tooling.
• Familiarity with data platforms, large language models, and responsible AI practices.
• Experience working in regulated, high-availability environments.
• Experience in AWS cloud & infrastructure.
• Experience in Content Management Systems including headless and headful architectures, composable content platforms, content APIs, omnichannel content delivery, personalization, and integration with modern frontend applications.

Conditions of Employment:

Candidates must be eligible to work in the country of interest at the time any offer of employment is made and are responsible for obtaining any required work permits, visas, or other authorizations necessary for employment. Prior to their start date, candidates will also need to provide proof of their eligibility to work in the country of interest.

Linguistic Requirements

Based on equal qualifications, preference will be given to bilingual candidates.

Diversity and Inclusion

Air Canada is strongly committed to Diversity and Inclusion and aims to create a healthy, accessible and rewarding work environment which highlights employees’ unique contributions to our company’s success.

As an equal opportunity employer, we welcome applications from all to help us build a diverse workforce which reflects the diversity of our customers, and communities, in which we live and serve.

Air Canada thanks all candidates for their interest; however only those selected to continue in the process will be contacted.