Technical Lead, API & Integration Engineering

Why you’ll love working here:

• high-performance, people-focused culture

• our commitment that equity, diversity, and inclusion are fundamental to our work environment and business success, which helps employees feel valued and empowered to be their authentic selves

• learning and development initiatives, including workshops, Speaker Series events and access to LinkedIn Learning, that support employees’ career growth

• membership in HOOPP’s world class defined benefit pension plan, which can serve as an important part of your retirement security

• competitive, 100% company-paid extended health and dental benefits for permanent employees, including coverage supporting our team's diversity and mental health (e.g., gender affirmation, fertility and drug treatment, psychological support benefits of $2,500 per year, parental leave top-up, and a health spending account).

• optional post-retirement health and dental benefits subsidized at 50%

• yoga classes, meditation workshops, nutritional consultations, and wellness seminars

• the opportunity to make a difference and help take care of those who care for us, by providing a financially secure retirement for Ontario healthcare workers

Job Summary

The Pension Application Development Team (PAD) is seeking a Technical Lead, API & Integration Engineering to help drive the delivery of product development for our Digital Insight Services Platform (DISP).

Reporting to the Director, Pension Application Development, the Technical Lead, API & Integration Engineering will own the design and delivery of API integration capabilities while guiding a team of developers. You will work closely with Product Owners, Business Analysts, Architecture, and delivery partners to translate product needs into practical technical solutions, while helping the team deliver secure, stable, and maintainable services through the DISP Orchestration API / Backend-for-Frontend layer.

You will act as a hands-on technical lead for product development initiatives, balancing delivery leadership with engineering depth. This role will provide technical mentorship to developers, guide design and implementation decisions, support predictable delivery, and help establish scalable engineering practices that improve speed, resilience, security, observability, and long-term maintainability. We value thoughtful innovation, secure engineering, shared ownership, and continuous learning.

What you will do:

Development and Maintenance

• Lead the design, delivery, and continuous improvement of API and integration solutions while mentoring and developing team members.
• Build and evolve RESTful APIs and integration services using .NET Core, Azure cloud functions or serverless services, or equivalent AWS or GCP capabilities.
• Lead complex integrations between modern digital platforms and legacy systems (e.g., Telus Health pension administration).
• Design integration layers that decouple digital channels from core systems, allowing front-end teams to move independently without over-coupling to backend constraints.
• Design secure, token-based API interactions using JWT, OAuth/OIDC patterns, managed identity, Key Vault, private endpoints, and least-privilege access controls.
• Implement resilience patterns (e.g., retries, idempotency, asynchronous workflows, messaging, caching).
• Partner with frontend teams to integrate APIs into modern web technologies such as React, Next.js, or comparable frontend frameworks.
• Design and maintain integration flows where writes may trigger downstream workflows, audits, status tracking, reconciliation, and eventual consistency across systems.
• Implement caching and read-model strategies using Redis, materialized views or projections, or equivalent patterns to improve performance and reduce load on legacy platforms.
• Ensure high-quality, secure code through reviews, automated testing, and CI/CD practices.

Agile and Collaboration

• Serve as a senior technical reference point for API integration decisions across our development squads while fostering an inclusive, respectful team environment that supports learning and shared ownership.
• Work closely with Product Owners and Business Analysts to clarify requirements, shape technical options, identify dependencies, and drive product development outcomes from discovery through delivery.
• Communicate complex technical risks and decisions clearly to technical and non-technical partners.

Development and Delivery

• Establish quality gates for APIs, including unit tests, integration tests, contract tests, API tests, performance tests, security tests, regression coverage, and release-readiness checks.
• Design for zero-downtime or low-disruption releases by applying backward-compatible changes, versioning discipline, feature toggles where appropriate, and clear operational runbooks.
• Proactively identify and address risks to delivery, system reliability, and user experience.
• Guide teams through trade-offs between synchronous APIs, asynchronous workflows, caching, event processing, eventual consistency, backend capability, and user experience needs.

What you will bring:

• Strong experience building secure, reliable RESTful APIs in .NET, ASP.NET Core, cloud functions or serverless services, or comparable enterprise API frameworks.
• Experience with API gateways, including Azure API Management or equivalent AWS/GCP API gateway services, F5/WAF patterns, throttling, rate limiting, and centralized API policy enforcement.
• Experience leading small technical teams or feature teams through product development delivery, including technical planning, developer mentorship, dependency management, and cross-functional collaboration with Product Owners, Business Analysts, QA, Architecture, and operations partners.
• Strong communication skills, with the ability to collaborate across technical and business teams.
• Experience integrating backend APIs with frontend applications built using React, Next.js, or similar modern frontend technologies is an asset.
• Experience with CI/CD, automated testing, environment promotion, release management, code review, secure development practices, and production change controls.
• Demonstrated experience designing enterprise integration layers that decouple digital channels from core systems.
• Proven experience implementing Backend-for-Frontend, orchestration, proxy, abstraction, or anti-corruption-layer patterns at scale.
• Experience in regulated or high-trust environments (e.g., financial services, healthcare) is an asset
• 10+ years of software engineering experience with 6+ years of focused experience in APIs, integration engineering, backend platform engineering, or service-oriented application development. 
• 3+ years designing and delivering integrations in Azure cloud-native environments, or equivalent experience with AWS or GCP services, including serverless compute, messaging, relational data stores, caching, secrets management, identity, API gateway patterns, monitoring, and observability.
  

The actual base salary offered to the successful candidate may vary based on multiple factors including, but not limited to, individual's expertise and level of experience applicable to the role they are being offered.  

This role is eligible to participate in discretionary incentive plan(s), subject to the terms and conditions of the applicable incentive plan text.  

HOOPP may use artificial intelligence tools to assist in screening, assessing and selecting applicants for this position. These tools support our recruitment process but do not replace human judgment and decision-making.