Senior Software Development Manager

Senior Development Manager – Parks & Recreation Platform

Software Engineering - Guelph, Ontario (Hybrid)

A recognized industry leader in reservation and park management technology and currently seeking a Senior Software Development Manager. We connect people to a world of memorable experiences through our robust, user-friendly reservation software and best-in-class call center services. Trusted by over 1,300 government-operated parks, campgrounds, harbors, and marinas across North America, and is dedicated to delivering innovative solutions that make it easier for visitors to discover, book, and enjoy the most beautiful landscapes.

We believe work should be fun, fulfilling, and flexible—and we're looking for friendly, motivated people to join us!

The Opportunity

We are committed to building great software and great engineering teams, and we're looking for a Senior Development Manager to lead multiple squads building our Parks & Recreation platform.

This is a player/coach role at senior scale. You will lead 10+ engineers across two or more squads, develop other managers and technical leads, own delivery and quality outcomes, and stay close enough to the code to make credible architectural calls, unblock hard problems, and mentor through pull requests.

You will hold the organization to a high engineering bar rooted in Clean Architecture, SOLID, and DRY — and you'll set the standard for how we adopt AI-assisted development across the department. The mandate is to make the whole organization faster, better, and more accountable.

Our platform processes millions of reservations a year for agencies including Parks Canada, Ontario Parks, BC Parks, and Mississippi State Parks. The work is tangible: real people, real campsites, real trips.

What you'll be doing

• Lead 10+ engineers across two or more squads through structured 1:1s, coaching, goal-setting, performance feedback, and career development plans.
• Hire, onboard, and integrate new team members with deliberate attention to team culture and capability.
• Develop other managers and technical leads, growing the leadership bench so the organization isn't dependent on any single individual.
• Measure and improve team effectiveness — delivery predictability, quality, engagement — and spot systemic patterns across squads.
• Own the health, engagement, and performance of the teams. Hold hard conversations early, humanely, and consistently.
• Contribute to code reviews, spikes, prototypes, and critical-path problems. Not the lead developer on every feature, but the engineer the team turns to when something is on fire.
• Pair with engineers on hard problems, unblock design decisions, and make credible architectural calls.
• Champion AI-assisted development — introduce, operate, and measure AI coding tools and agent workflows in real delivery.
• Steer planning cadence, Agile practice, definition of done, code review standards, and continuous improvement.
• Own predictable delivery. Manage capacity, dependencies, and risk across squads, and communicate honestly and early when scope, timeline, or quality is at risk.
• Align squads with delivery interdependencies before conflicts escalate.
• Create and maintain engineering process documentation and team standards clear enough that teams can operate without verbal interpretation.
• Coordinate cross-team production incident response at the management level, with clear status communication to leadership and stakeholders.
• Provide management-level escalation support so resolution is never stalled by unclear ownership.
• Own on-call culture, postmortem quality, and reliability follow-through.

What you'll bring

• Proven experience leading 10+ engineers across two or more teams, including hiring, difficult conversations, performance management, and developing other managers or leads.
• 10+ years of progressive software engineering experience, including 4+ years managing people.
• A recent, demonstrable history of shipping code — pull requests, design docs, architecture reviews. You're comfortable diving into unfamiliar code and unblocking hard problems without taking the work over.
• Strong delivery and operational ownership: Agile foundations (Scrum, Kanban, or hybrid), a track record of predictable delivery and honest early escalation, and hands-on experience with CI/CD, automated testing, and running production services including on-call and postmortems.
• Working command of Clean Architecture, SOLID, DRY, and Domain-Driven Design, and a track record of holding a high engineering bar without slowing delivery to a crawl.
• Exceptional written and verbal communication — able to speak credibly with engineers, product managers, executives, and customers, and translate between them under pressure.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related technical field, or equivalent experience.
  

Assets:

• Hands-on experience introducing and measuring AI coding tools or agent workflows inside a real engineering team.
• Modern .NET / C# (Core / 8+), ASP.NET Core, Entity Framework Core, SQL Server; familiarity with Angular.
• Azure (App Service, Functions, SQL Azure, Storage, Key Vault, Application Insights) and Azure DevOps; Infrastructure-as-Code (Bicep, ARM, or Terraform).
• Experience in parks, recreation, campgrounds, permitting, events, ticketing, reservations, or municipal/government B2B software.
• Multi-tenant SaaS at scale — tenant isolation, upgrades, observability.
• Leading a modernization or re-platforming effort for a large enterprise or B2B application.
• Familiarity with SOC 2, ISO 27001, PCI, or public-sector security and compliance equivalents.
• Messaging and integration experience: Azure Service Bus, Event Grid, REST/GraphQL, modern data platforms.

Why join Us:

• Competitive base salary.
• Comprehensive group benefits: extended health, dental, vision, and paramedical coverage.
• RRSP matching program.
• Ongoing professional development support, including certifications.
• Real scope from day one — you'll shape how engineering works here, not administer someone else's system.