Engineering Team Lead
Riva International · Canada
Riva is seeking a hands-on Engineering Team Lead to guide the development of our AI-powered meeting intelligence product. This product transforms conversations between relationship managers and their clients into structured, CRM-ready insights, helping ensure that valuable client context is accurately captured and available when it is needed.
You will join one of Riva’s most AI-forward teams, where AI is integrated directly into the software development lifecycle. The team uses agentic workflows to support development and code review and continues to explore new ways for AI agents to take ownership of engineering work.
WHAT YOU WILL BE DOING
In this role, you will lead a small engineering team that is expected to approximately double in size. This is a hands-on leadership position, with approximately 60–70% of your time focused on coding, architecture, and system design. The remainder of your time will be dedicated to supporting the team, strengthening engineering processes, and representing technical decisions in leadership discussions.
As the Engineering Team Lead, your responsibilities will be centered around delivering the following outcomes:
- Provide hands-on technical leadership. Design, build, and maintain full-stack product capabilities while contributing directly to coding, architecture, and system design.
- Own system architecture and workflow design. Lead high-level architecture decisions and design reliable end-to-end workflows for an AI-powered SaaS product.
- Lead an AI-native development environment. Use and expand agentic AI workflows throughout the development lifecycle, including specification, implementation, review, testing, and delivery.
- Partner with Product. Work closely with the Product Owner to manage the backlog, refine requirements, estimate work, plan sprints, and support product rollouts and optimization.
- Strengthen engineering delivery. Own and continuously improve development workflows, CI/CD practices, release traceability, technical standards, and team processes.
- Manage technical risk. Track technical debt, identify dependencies approaching end of support, and clearly communicate risks, tradeoffs, blockers, and timelines before they affect delivery.
- Build quality into the product. Partner with the team’s tester to strengthen unit, integration, end-to-end, and automated test coverage, particularly for AI-enabled features.
- Lead Agile team practices. Facilitate sprint planning, backlog refinement, demos, retrospectives, and other Agile ceremonies while maintaining visibility into delivery progress.
- Communicate technical decisions. Represent the team in bi-weekly leadership meetings and explain architecture, timelines, risks, and technical decisions to both technical and non-technical audiences.
- Coach and develop the team. Hold regular one-on-one meetings, provide timely feedback, mentor engineers, support performance reviews, and create opportunities for continued growth.
- Scale the team effectively. Establish the structure, processes, and working practices needed to support the team as it grows.
- Actively engage in your career progression. Examine your skill gaps and identify opportunities for training, industry certifications, and project work to elevate your skills and support continued career growth.
During your first 30 days, you will focus primarily on learning the product, roadmap, development environment, internal processes, and business domain, including CRM, banking, messaging systems, and specification-driven development. By 60 days, you will begin contributing low-risk production work and establish a plan to address any identified skill gaps. By 90 days, you will be operating at full capacity. Over your first 6–12 months, you will build a strong partnership with Product, take ownership of release traceability, and begin contributing to higher-leverage initiatives such as improving client onboarding.
WHAT YOU BRING TO THE ROLE
- Leadership Experience:
- Proven experience leading a software engineering team.
- Experience owning system design, architecture, backlog management, delivery reporting, and engineering workflow improvements.
- Experience presenting technical decisions, risks, tradeoffs, and timelines to leadership.
- Demonstrated success coaching and mentoring engineers, providing feedback, and supporting performance conversations.
- Experience working in an Agile software development environment.
- Experience helping a software team grow and introducing the processes needed to support that growth.
- AI Product and Development Experience:
- Experience developing customer-facing products with integrated AI capabilities, including hands-on involvement in the software development lifecycle.
- Strong understanding of the product lifecycle for AI-enabled features, including development, testing, deployment, monitoring, and continuous improvement.
- Ability to assess and clearly communicate the risks, limitations, and tradeoffs associated with AI-powered solutions.
- Software Engineering Skills:
- Strong full-stack software engineering experience.
- Solid foundation in C#, .NET 10, TypeScript, and REST API design.
- Experience working with Microsoft Graph API.
- Strong architecture and system design capabilities.
- Experience owning CI/CD pipelines and deployment workflows.
- Cloud deployment experience; AWS experience is preferred but not required.
- Strong understanding of unit, integration, and end-to-end testing.
- Experience working with relational or NoSQL databases.
- Ability to communicate technical concepts clearly to technical and non-technical audiences.
- Bonus Points For:
- Experience with Vue 3.
- Experience with MongoDB.
- Familiarity with additional technologies in Riva’s engineering stack.
- Experience leading a team through active growth.
- Formal performance review experience.
- Experience working in a startup or similarly fast-paced environment.
- Experience owning the full software development lifecycle.
- A self-directed approach to learning and professional development.
Our current technology stack includes:
- Frontend: Vue 3, TypeScript, Vite, Tailwind, Reka UI, Vitest, and Playwright.
- AI Agent Layer: TypeScript, Bun, LangGraph, Claude, Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, and Vitest.
- Backend: .NET 10, C#, TypeScript, REST APIs, xUnit, and MongoDB.
- Serverless: Node.js, TypeScript, MongoDB, AWS CloudFormation, and Amazon Bedrock.
- Infrastructure: Microsoft Graph API, Terraform, and AWS services including ECS, Fargate, Lambda, S3, DynamoDB, DocumentDB, SQS, EventBridge, SNS, Bedrock, Comprehend, API Gateway, and Route 53.
- CI/CD: GitHub Actions.
- Containerization: Docker.
CORE COMPETENCIES FOR SUCCESS
- Integrity & Accountability: Acts with honesty and responsibility, takes ownership of actions and decisions, and raises risks or concerns early.
- Collaboration: Embraces diverse perspectives and works effectively with Engineering, Product, Quality Assurance, and leadership to achieve shared goals.
- Continuous Learning: Consistently seeks opportunities to expand technical, leadership, and AI capabilities.
- Design Thinking: Uses creativity, emerging technologies, and customer-centered approaches to solve complex problems.
- Analytical Thinking & Decision Making: Evaluates information, risks, and tradeoffs to make clear and well-reasoned decisions.
- Managing Resources & Digital Dexterity: Adapts to new technologies while effectively managing time, priorities, and team capacity.
- Operational Alignment & Coordination: Ensures engineering activities are coordinated, efficient, and aligned with product and organizational objectives.
- Talent Management & Development: Develops team members through coaching, feedback, mentorship, and meaningful growth opportunities.
- Innovation: Encourages experimentation and creates an environment where new ideas and approaches can be explored responsibly.
MORE ABOUT RIVA
We are an Edmonton-based software development company with a global footprint. Our Relationship Engine creates seamless data flow between applications such as email, calendar, contacts, tasks, and CRM platforms, synchronizing data and reducing task switching, application toggling, and duplicate data entry.
This role offers the pace, ownership, and autonomy of a startup environment within a stable, profitable, and growing company with established customers. You will join a small, collaborative team that supports one another and is actively shaping how AI is used both within our products and throughout the development process.
Riva provides a clear technical career path, with opportunities to progress toward a Staff-level engineering role and ultimately pursue either an architecture or people-management path.
We offer a work culture that fosters diversity, equity, inclusion, and fun, where curiosity is rewarded and each day offers the opportunity to learn, grow, and contribute alongside people you like, respect, and value.
WHAT WE BRING TO THE TABLE
- RRSP/TFSA matching.
- Paid vacation starting with three weeks.
- Paid wellness time for mental health, personal appointments, and personal needs.
- Paid time off to volunteer with charities of your choice.
- Extended health care benefits, dental coverage, and life insurance.
- Professional development and training allowance for career advancement.
Applicants must hold a valid Canadian work permit or be a permanent resident or citizen of Canada.
Riva is an equal opportunity employer. Qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, colour, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender perception or identity, national origin, age, marital status, protected veteran status, or disability status.
We appreciate all applicants for their interest in joining Riva. Please note that only candidates selected to move forward in the process will be contacted.