Engineering Lead Backend

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 Engineering Lead, you'll lead a group of backend engineers who are embedded in delivery teams across ANVIL. Your engineers do their day-to-day work within those teams; you own their professional development, performance, technical growth, and the consistency of backend practice across the discipline.

Your primary focus is enabling the engineers you manage through coaching, performance development, and code review. You'll also serve as the steward of backend craft at ANVIL: ensuring our standards, patterns, and architectural direction translate consistently into every delivery team.

We believe the best engineering leads stay close to the work. This role is designed to give you space to keep contributing technically, because staying current is what allows you to genuinely enable the engineers you manage: coaching them through real problems, reviewing their code with authority, and engaging meaningfully with the design decisions they navigate every day.

Architectural direction at ANVIL is set by our Architecture function, but your role in that direction is far from passive. You help inform it by bringing the realities of delivery-team work into the conversation, you raise concerns and friction your engineers encounter, and you help implement the vision day to day, making sure decisions are understood, applied consistently, and refined as their real-world implications become clear.

This is a full-time position based in Ottawa, with remote flexibility. Eligible candidates must either possess or be eligible to obtain a Government of Canada Top Secret security clearance.

Key Responsibilities

Lead and Develop Backend Engineers

• Manage a team of backend engineers embedded across multiple delivery teams, serving as their primary point of support, accountability, and professional development.
• Run regular 1:1s focused on growth, blockers, feedback, and career trajectories.
• Provide honest, timely, well-framed performance feedback; contribute to formal performance reviews and help engineers understand what meaningful progress looks like for them.
• Foster a craft culture where high standards and psychological safety coexist.
• Contribute to hiring, technical interviews, and onboarding as the discipline grows.

Steward Backend Craft Across Delivery Teams

• Uphold backend coding standards, API design conventions, data modelling practices, and testing expectations consistently across every delivery team, partnering with QA to ensure code review sits within a broader, well-functioning quality system.
• Identify patterns in code quality issues across delivery teams and address them systematically through coaching, documentation, or process changes.
• Ensure backend practice stays coherent as the organization scales, surfacing inconsistencies and resolving them before they fragment the discipline.

Carry the Architectural Vision

• Serve as the primary communication bridge between Architecture and the backend engineers in each delivery team, ensuring architectural decisions are understood, applied consistently, and that real-world friction with those decisions is surfaced back for refinement.
• Feed delivery-team realities, friction, and lessons learned back into the Architecture function so direction can be refined.
• Help engineers in delivery teams navigate complex architectural calls, knowing when to apply existing patterns and when to escalate.

Partner Across the Organization

Beyond the architectural partnership covered above, your closest partners are Product and the delivery teams your engineers are embedded in.

• Bring backend perspective into Product's requirements, design documents, and specifications, shaping work before it reaches delivery teams.
• Represent the backend discipline's progress, capacity, and technical needs clearly to engineering leadership.

Staying Hands-On

We expect our leads to remain technically grounded, and we'll protect time for you to do that. You will not be contributing code inside delivery teams; instead, your hands-on work is directed at cross-cutting concerns that benefit the whole discipline, typically architectural reviews, design spikes, shared libraries, internal tooling, proof-of-concept work, or technical documentation. The goal is to keep your instincts sharp enough to lead with credibility and to leave the discipline better than you found it.

What We're Looking For

Security Clearance

• Eligible for Government of Canada Top Secret security clearance.

Experience

• 5+ years of backend engineering experience, with significant production-grade work in Python and SQL.
• Demonstrated experience leading or formally mentoring other engineers, whether through a prior lead or management role, or a consistent track record of raising the quality and capability of those around you.
• 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 exposure to real-time protocols (WebSocket, SSE) and event-driven systems (Kafka, Redpanda), with the architectural literacy to know when each pattern is the right tool.
• Experience using code review as a quality gate, catching defects and shaping how a team thinks about service design, data modelling, consistency, and long-term maintainability.

Skills and Competencies

• A clear and considered approach to technical leadership: able to carry architectural direction across multiple teams, communicate the reasoning behind it, and bring engineers along without creating bottlenecks.
• Strong coaching instincts, with the ability 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 while protecting the conditions in which engineers can do their best work.
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills, with the ability to represent the backend discipline to engineers, product stakeholders, and senior leadership alike.
• Proven ability to support engineers through complex system and integration failures, and to use those moments as structured learning opportunities for the broader discipline.

Nice to Have

• Experience with knowledge management systems, case management systems, or relevant defence industry applications.
• Experience working in or closely with defence, public safety, or national security organizations.
• Familiarity with Agile/Scrum methodologies and experience helping teams operate effectively within sprint-based delivery cycles.
• Prior involvement in hiring processes, technical interviews, or onboarding programs for engineering teams.

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: At Anvil, we believe the best work is enriched by AI and driven by people. We work with AI-powered tools to help us focus on your skills and reduces bias. While AI helps us get started, your journey with us is guided by real people. Every final decision is made by a member of our team who values the unique perspective you bring