Principal, Software Engineering – Shared Services

Our employees are at the heart of everything we do. Together, we help people, businesses, and society prosper in good times and be resilient in bad times.

Our employee promise represents Intact’s commitment to you in exchange for living our Values, striving to do your best work, being open to change and investing in your career. In return, we promise to provide support, opportunities and performance-led financial rewards at a workplace where you can shape the future, win as a team and grow with us.

Pay at Intact is about much more than just salary.

• Flexible work arrangements and a hybrid work model

• Possibility to purchase up to 5 extra days off per year

• Multiple benefits offered to support physical and mental wellbeing, including telemedicine, Wellness account and much more

• Share plan & other savings: up to 12% of salary or even more (ask how you could earn guaranteed income for life)

Salary range (but not limited to):

Annual bonus target, based on the base salary, with a potential payout of up to double the target (subject to personal and company performance):

As part of our commitment to Win As A Team, we share our success with employees through our annual bonus plan and Employee Share Purchase Plan (ESPP) - with Intact matching 50% of your net shares.

Our pension offerings provide flexibility and long-term security for our employees beyond their careers. We are one of the few companies offering the opportunity to receive guaranteed income for life via our defined benefit pension plan.

Salary for the candidate will be determined taking into consideration a number of factors including: experience, skills, qualifications, anticipated contribution to role, internal equity, etc. The salary range presented above is based on a 35-hour workweek and would represent a majority of different candidate profiles. However, we encourage candidates who may fall outside of this range to apply as well.

About the role

We’re looking for a Principal, Software Engineering to join our Shared Services team!

This role reports directly to the Vice-President, Software Engineering Shared Services.

The Shared Services organization at Intact provides reusable enterprise platforms and capabilities used across multiple business areas. Its portfolio typically includes content and document services, customer and reference data, decision-support technology, product configuration, integration services, distributor platforms, and a mix of modern and legacy platforms. The organization acts as a central point of engagement for shared demand and is evolving these capabilities into secure, resilient, independently deployable services with clear ownership, roadmaps, service boundaries, and measurable outcomes.

The Principal, Software Engineering is the most senior hands-on technical leader in the Shared Technology Services organization. The role works across platforms, products, and teams to solve complex business and engineering problems, set technology direction, and improve the productivity and effectiveness of the broader engineering community.

Technical credibility comes from sustained, current contribution: writing production code, pairing with engineers, reviewing designs and code, resolving high-risk problems, and proving new approaches in working software.

This role combines deep technical expertise, strategic thinking, business acumen, and mentorship. It is distinct from an architecture governance role: the Principal remains engaged from technical strategy and design through implementation, production readiness, and continuous improvement. The role helps shared technology services operate as dependable enterprise platforms rather than a collection of project-specific solutions.

What you’ll do here:

Hands-On Engineering:

• • Write and review production code on the organization’s most important, shared platforms and critical delivery paths.

• • Pair directly with engineers to resolve high-ambiguity challenges across modern cloud services, APIs, integration platforms, commercial products, and legacy systems.

• • Lead by example during production incidents, performance investigations, security remediation, and complex defect resolution.

• • Build working slices and proofs of concept to validate technical direction before teams scale an approach.

• • Develop reusable frameworks, APIs, automation, and engineering toolkits that improve consistency and accelerate delivery across product teams.

Technical Leadership Through Doing, Not Decree:

• • Own and shape technology direction and roadmaps for shared capabilities in alignment with enterprise business and technology objectives.

• • Translate enterprise needs into practical platform boundaries, technical decisions, and sequenced modernization plans.

• • Advance strategic priorities such as independent release cadences, API-led integration, pragmatic cloud modernization, legacy-platform renewal, continuous improvement, and faster paths to production.

• • Promote cross-team collaboration so decisions support the overall business and technology strategy rather than a single product area.

• • Serve as a trusted technical advisor to senior technology leaders, architects, and engineering leaders on high-risk or novel decisions.

Quality, Standards & Thought Leadership:

• • Define, model, and reinforce software engineering practices across design, development, testing, continuous delivery, observability, production support, security, and applicable regulatory requirements.

• • Improve platform resilience, scalability, maintainability, and total cost of ownership through rationalization, standardization, technical-debt reduction, and lifecycle planning.

• • Champion secure delivery practices, quality engineering, automation, and responsible AI adoption in the software development lifecycle, with appropriate human validation and governance.

• • Evaluate emerging technologies and introduce them through evidence-based experiments that can be adopted safely at enterprise scale.

• • Ensure shared capabilities remain reusable and free of unnecessary business-area-specific logic, with ownership boundaries made explicit.

Mentorship & Multiplier Effect:

• • Act as a force multiplier across Shared Technology Services by pairing, conducting deep technical reviews, co-designing solutions, and helping teams remove blockers.

• • Mentor senior engineers and technical leaders toward Principal-level scope, judgement, and enterprise impact.

• • Build technical communities and shared practices across content services, data platforms, decision-support capabilities, product tooling, integration services, digital channels, and legacy-technology domains.

• • Demystify complex concepts and break large modernization challenges into practical, approachable delivery steps.

• • Represent the organization in internal technical forums and contribute to the broader engineering community.

Accountability:

• • Be accountable for technical outcomes across multiple shared products and initiatives, from inception through development, deployment, operation, and modernization.

• • Partner with senior technology leaders to turn business priorities into transparent, committed platform roadmaps and measurable engineering outcomes.

• • Own or influence critical decisions involving platform performance, scalability, security, production readiness, and technology lifecycle.

• • Help partners engage Shared Technology Services earlier through clearer demand, dependency, and capacity planning.

• • Stay engaged through execution and production adoption rather than stopping at recommendation or design approval.

What you bring to the table:

• Bachelor’s or master’s degree in computer science, software engineering, or a related discipline, or an equivalent combination of education and experience.
• Extensive software development experience, including significant recent hands-on coding and technical leadership across complex production environments.
• Deep expertise in modern software architecture, system design patterns, APIs, microservices, distributed systems, and major cloud platforms.
• Strong practical experience with modern programming languages and frameworks in the Java ecosystem, web application development, service interfaces, event-driven integration, relational and non-relational data stores, continuous delivery, automated testing, and observability.
• Proven success designing scalable, resilient systems and resolving difficult production, performance, security, and integration problems.
• Experience establishing engineering best practices, reusable frameworks, secure delivery capabilities, and measurable improvements to flow, quality, and reliability.
• Excellent problem-solving skills and the ability to navigate ambiguity, influence across organizational boundaries, and connect technical decisions to business outcomes.
• Strong communication and stakeholder-management skills, including the ability to advise senior leaders and collaborate with geographically distributed teams.
• For candidates located in Quebec, bilingualism is required considering the necessity to interact on a regular basis with English-speaking colleagues across the country.
• No Canadian work experience required however must be eligible to work in Canada.

Success Measures:

• Measurable improvement in deployment frequency, lead time, change reliability, production stability, security posture, and defect escape rate across supported platforms.
• Reduction in cross-platform coupling, manual handoffs, and dependencies that prevent shared technology teams from releasing independently.
• Delivery of committed modernization, cloud, API, automation, and decommissioning roadmap outcomes.
• Reusable engineering capabilities adopted by multiple teams, with clear gains in productivity, consistency, or time to market.
• Improved platform health, lifecycle risk, observability, and total cost of ownership across the shared technology portfolio.
• Growth of senior technical talent, demonstrated through stronger technical decisions, effective pairing and mentorship, and a deeper pipeline for Principal-level roles.
• Stronger partner confidence through transparent roadmaps, earlier dependency planning, clearer service boundaries, and reliable delivery against commitments.

We are an equal opportunity employer

At Intact, our Value of respect is founded on seeing diversity as a strength. We strive to create an accessible workplace where employees feel valued, included and encouraged to share their unique perspectives.

We encourage applications from individuals who are members of equity-deserving groups, including but not limited to women, Indigenous peoples, persons with disabilities, Black people, and members of the 2SLGBTQI+ community.

As part of Intact’s commitment to reconciliation, we acknowledge that we work, meet and travel across the land currently called Canada, originally inhabited by First Nations, Metis and Inuit people. This history extends through many centuries and continues to evolve today.

We have policies to ensure equal access and participation for people with disabilities, including providing workplace adjustments (accommodations). A copy of applicable policies is available on request.

If we can provide a specific adjustment to make the recruitment process more accessible for you, please let us know when we reach out about a job opportunity. We’ll work with you to meet your needs.

Learn more about our recruitment process and your candidate journey here.

Please note that Intact does not provide sponsorship or other support for immigration-related matters including but not limited to employer-specific closed work permits. Candidates must be eligible to work in Canada from the anticipated start date and throughout their employment and are solely responsible for maintaining their work eligibility.

If you are an employee of Intact or belairdirect, please apply for this role on Internal Career Site.