Team Lead, Backend Engineering

About ANVIL

ANVIL is a trusted partner in the defence industry, delivering cutting-edge solutions that enhance military capabilities and operational effectiveness. We extend our expertise to public safety, law enforcement, and national security organizations, accelerating mission-critical decision-making through analytical tools, automations, and game-changing machine learning capabilities. ANVIL helps organizations discover, manage, enrich, fuse, and exploit the information available to them in support of Information Dominance and Decision Advantage.

Job Type: Full Time Remote (Hybrid option available for those in the Ottawa area - 55 Murray Street Office)

Total Compensation: CAD $122,500.00 - $162,500.00 base salary - Placement within range based on experience and qualifications

Vacancy Status: This posting is for an existing vacancy. Anvil is actively recruiting to fill this position.

Role (Description)

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.

Required Qualifications

Security Clearance

Eligible for Government of Canada Top Secret security clearance

Experience

• 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)

Skills & Competencies

• 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

Preferred Qualifications & Competencies

• 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

Key Responsibilities

Team Leadership & Mentorship

• 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

Code Quality & Technical Standards

• 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

Technical Contribution

• 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

Project Support & Communication

• 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

Why Join Us?

Our Mission

This is more than just a job; you'll be part of a team of dedicated professionals who share a common goal: to increase the safety and security of Western democracies through the effective use of data. Our workplace is not just a job; it's a community of like-minded people working together to make a positive impact on the world we live in.

Compensation & Benefits

• Competitive salaries
• Flexible health benefits package through Equitable
• Industry-leading employer retirement contributions match

Work Environment

• Hybrid work model combining remote flexibility with meaningful in-person collaboration
• Modern office in the historic Carriageway building in beautiful downtown Ottawa
• Access to downtown amenities, transit, and Ottawa's vibrant cultural scene

What You'll Experience

• Work alongside dedicated professionals who value excellence and collaboration
• Contribute to building the team behind technologies with real-world security impact
• Ground-floor opportunity to shape people operations as ANVIL scales
• Join a culture where your expertise and ideas matter

Application Process

To apply for this role, please submit your CV and cover letter. The application process will likely include:

• A preliminary call with our team, which will be a chance for you to find out more about ANVIL and the role.
• An initial interview to discuss your experience and suitability for the role.
• A practical exercise to assess your approach to common scenarios in the role.

ANVIL welcomes and encourages applications from people with disabilities. Accommodations are available on request for candidates participating in all aspects of the selection process.

Use of AI in Recruitment: ANVIL does not use artificial intelligence to screen, assess, or select applicants for this position. All applications are reviewed by members of our recruitment team.