Software Development Manager

About Loblaw Digital

At Loblaw Digital, we know that our customers expect the best from us. Whether that means building the best, most innovative online shopping experience, or designing an app that will impact the lives of people across the country, we’re up for the challenge. From our office in Downtown Toronto, we’ve created leading eCommerce experiences in the online grocery shopping, beauty, pharmacy, and apparel spaces, and we’re only just getting started.

Why is this role important?

As a Software Development Manager, you will lead and grow a team of engineers to deliver high-quality products and platforms. You will be responsible for balancing technical execution, people leadership, and cross-functional collaboration. You will drive engineering best practices, enable career growth for your team, and ensure alignment with product and business priorities.

Key Responsibilities

People Leadership

• Lead, coach, and mentor a team of software engineers, fostering a culture of learning, growth, and accountability.
• Conduct regular 1:1s, performance reviews, and career development planning.
• Ensure the team has clarity of goals, expectations, and success metrics.
• Champion diversity, equity, and inclusion within the team.

Technical Leadership

• Provide technical guidance and ensure strong engineering practices across design, code quality, testing, and operations.
• Drive architecture discussions and partner with senior engineers to make high-impact technical decisions.
• Balance long-term technical investments with immediate business needs.
• Promote reliability, scalability, and performance in delivered systems.

Execution & Delivery

• Partner with Product and Design to define roadmaps and deliverables.
• Own delivery commitments, ensuring predictable execution across sprints and releases.
• Track and communicate progress, risks, and trade-offs to stakeholders.
• Ensure teams have the right processes, tooling, and automation to deliver efficiently.
• Ensure consistent API contracts and integration patterns across Backend-for-frontend (BFF) implementations.
• Drive consolidation initiatives (e.g., monorepo, shared libraries, gateway extensions) while maintaining team autonomy.
• Balance independent scaling of BFF services with shared infrastructure needs.

Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Collaborate with Product Managers, Designers, and other stakeholders to align priorities and remove blockers.
• Communicate effectively with leadership and partner teams.
• Represent engineering in planning, prioritization, and strategic discussions.
• Partner with frontend teams to optimize BFF APIs for web and mobile clients.
• Coordinate with infrastructure teams on gateway routing, service mesh, and observability.

Culture & Impact

• Foster a strong engineering culture centered on customer impact, collaboration, and continuous improvement.
• Encourage innovation and experimentation while maintaining operational excellence.
• Contribute to broader organizational goals, sharing best practices across teams.

Qualifications & Experience

Qualifications

• 3+ years of engineering management experience, or 7+ years of senior engineering experience with leadership responsibilities.
• Strong technical background (web, mobile, backend, or platform) with ability to guide teams through complex systems and trade-offs.
• Deep understanding of Backend-for-Frontend (BFF) patterns and their application across multiple client types (web, mobile).
• Experience designing and implementing service orchestration, data aggregation, and transformation layers.
• Knowledge of API Gateway patterns, routing strategies, and request/response transformation.
• Understanding of stateless architectures and stateless service design.
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, and deployment strategies.
• Knowledge of observability tools (Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, distributed tracing).
• Experience leading agile teams and shipping high-quality products at scale.
• Excellent communication, facilitation, and conflict-resolution skills.
• Proven ability to mentor and grow engineers at different levels.

Tools & Technologies

• Languages: Java 17+
• Frameworks: Spring Boot 3.x, Spring WebFlux, Project Reactor
• Build Tools: Maven, Gradle
• API: REST, OpenAPI/Swagger, GraphQL (nice to have)
• Mapping: MapStruct, Jackson
• Testing: JUnit 5, Mockito, WireMock, Cucumber (BDD)
• Observability: Micrometer, Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry
• Caching: Caffeine, Redis
• Version Control: Git, GitLab
• CI/CD: GitLab CI, similar

How You’ll Succeed at Loblaw Digital

At Loblaw Digital, we seek great people to continually strengthen our culture. We believe great people model our values, are authentic, build trust and make connections.

We’re able to keep innovating because our colleagues are passionate about their work and excited about the future of eCommerce.

If you have big ideas, undeniable enthusiasm, and thrive in a collaborative, creative, and diverse group, we’ll get along just fine.

Looking for a challenge? Good. Love an innovative work environment? Even better.

Apply today.