Manager, Software Development

About the Role

The Manager, Software Development leads the team responsible for building and maintaining features for a media intelligence and outreach platform. Agility PR Solutions develops state-of-the-art tools to allow public relations professionals to target media influencers and to derive media intelligence to support business decisions. Your team will be building RESTful services in Java and deploying them to a high availability production environment. You will leverage technologies such as Solr, Kafka, Zookeeper to provide the backbone of these services, and solve problems pertaining to large volumes of data, such as distributed workloads and process synchronization. Your team will design, build, and scale production-grade agentic workflows and AI-driven applications.

Agility is focused on building production-grade agentic workflows and AI-driven applications, and complete, timely mention data is the foundation for the insights and alerts our clients depend on. You will lead, grow, and support a team of software developers, set technical direction, and ensure the team delivers reliable, high-quality work. You will work collaboratively with Product, Customer Success, Sales, Account Management, Content Partnerships, and our leadership team to align engineering work with business priorities and client needs.

What you’ll do

• Lead and develop a team of software developers, setting clear goals and expectations.
• Build a team culture of accountability, collaboration, continuous improvement, and technical excellence.
• Set technical direction and architecture for crawling, collection, and mention-matching systems.
• Partner with Product Owners to translate client needs and business priorities into a clear technical roadmap.
• Ensure systems are scalable, reliable, and cost-effective as the product evolves.
• Ensure we have an evaluation strategy and framework to evaluate how well our AI Agents are operating.
• Oversee incident response and on-call processes, and lead root-cause analysis for production issues.
• Stay technically involved through design reviews, code reviews, and hands-on problem solving when needed.
• Evaluate and introduce new tools/AI techniques to ensure the team is productive and efficient.

What You'll Bring

• 7+ years of experience in software development, including work with web crawling, data ingestion, or large-scale data pipelines.
• 2+ years of experience managing or leading a team of software developers.
• You possess a bachelor's degree in computer science or related field (or equivalent experience).
• Strong technical background in Java or similar type-safe languages
• Experience designing distributed systems, including message queues or streaming platforms such as Kafka.
• Experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, or Azure), containerization (Docker, Kubernetes), and CI/CD practices is an asset.
• Familiarity with search technologies such as Elasticsearch or Solr, and with Boolean query logic.
• Experience working with APIs and third-party data providers.
• Experience working in an Agile environment, and with JIRA and Confluence.
• Excellent communication skills that allow you to explain technical topics clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• You are data driven and use metrics to guide decisions and measure your team's success.
• You're a leader who balances delivery with the growth and well-being of your team.
• Experience with NLP, LLMs, entity recognition, or sentiment analysis is an asset.
• Experience within PR Software, media monitoring, social listening, or the Newswire industry is an asset.

Why You'll Love It Here

• Fully remote work environment
• Collaborative culture – and key tools enabling it
• Competitive compensation package
• Health, Dental & Vision benefits
• RRSP matching
• Life Insurance
• Employee Assistance Program (EAP)
• Career Development & Progression opportunities
• Paid Vacation, Personal Days and Sick days
• Week off between Christmas and New Years'
• No Internal Meetings Fridays

Compensation for this role is expected to fall within the range of $145,000-165,000CAD annually. The final offer will reflect each candidate's experience, skills, and internal equity. 
This is for a new position.

AI Usage

We use technology to make hiring smarter, faster, and more personal, never less human. Artificial intelligence (AI) tools help us manage applications efficiently and highlight qualifications that align with each role, allowing our recruiters to focus more on meaningful conversations with candidates.

AI does not make hiring decisions at Agility. Every decision is made by people, our hiring managers and recruitment professionals, who are trained to apply sound judgment and equitable practices at every stage.

We believe technology exists to amplify human insight, not replace it. That belief shapes how we build relationships, tell stories, and grow our teams.

At Agility, we strive every day to build a more inclusive work environment and introduce tools that enable it. We strongly encourage applications from all people regardless of race, religion, gender, age, disability status or sexual orientation.

Even if you find yourself not checking all the boxes of our listed requirements but you are excited about this opportunity, we'd love to hear from you anyway. Our Talent Acquisition team will review your application for this role, and other potential role matches open now or in the future.