About usAppnovation is a global, full-service digital partner that combines Strategy, Experience & Design, Engineering and Managed Services. We build digital solutions that deliver real impact today and serve as foundations for future growth. Bold ambition. Practical action. Endless possibilities.As Technical Lead, you will be the senior .NET authority on a dedicated, cross-functional scrum team building a contemporary operational SaaS platform for K-12 education. The platform helps school divisions automate administrative workflows, manage information across their organization, and surface operational insight - which in practice means long-running, multi-step business processes, heavy integration between systems, and reporting that has to hold up under scrutiny from district administrators.Your team operates as an embedded extension of the client's product and engineering organization, not as an external group receiving isolated tickets. It owns assigned product services end-to-end: analysis, planning, implementation, quality assurance, documentation, and release readiness. The client sets product direction and owns architecture and engineering standards; your team is accountable for converting prioritized objectives into production-ready functionality without needing day-to-day coordination.That means you will be working inside an established codebase and an established set of standards, influencing them through implementation plans and evidence rather than unilateral redesign. This is a manager-level role. Alongside deep technical ownership, you will lead a team that includes embedded business analysis and QA capability - setting expectations, developing people, running sprint delivery, and representing the technical position directly to client stakeholders.Key ResponsibilitiesLeading a cross-functional scrum team - developers, business analysis, and QA - accountable end-to-end for assigned product services and feature areasWriting and reviewing production C# and .NET Core code daily, and setting the standard for what good looks like in the codebaseWorking within the client's established architecture and engineering standards, and influencing them through implementation plans and evidence rather than unilateral decisionsProducing technical analysis and implementation plans for significant changes, ahead of development startingDesigning Temporal workflow implementations - activity boundaries, retry and compensation strategy, idempotency, and workflow versioningImplementing event-driven integration against defined pub/sub contracts, and flagging where contracts need to changeImplementing authorization against OpenFGA policies and Keycloak-backed OAuth 2.0 / OpenID Connect flows in a multi-tenant contextWorking across PostgreSQL transactional models and ClickHouse reporting data within the client's data architectureDiagnosing and resolving performance issues across the .NET stack - EF Core query plans, connection pooling, async/await misuse, memory and allocation behaviourOwning the team's sprint delivery - refinement, planning, review,



and retrospective - without the client needing to act as delivery coordinatorEnsuring merge requests are small and reviewable, peer review is substantive, and CodeRabbit and pipeline feedback is addressed rather than waved throughHolding the team to a definition of done that includes requirements validation, automated test coverage, documentation, release readiness, and supportabilityOwning post-release stabilization and defect resolution for recently delivered workEscalating risks, dependencies, and missing business decisions earlyLine-managing and mentoring engineers - goal setting, performance feedback, career development, and technical onboardingPartnering with client product and engineering stakeholders on trade-offs, sequencing, and feasibilityWhat we are looking forMust-HaveAt least 8 years of professional software engineering experience, with the majority in C# and .NET in production environmentsRecognised depth in .NET Core and ASP.NET Core - you have owned non-trivial services end to end and can reason about the runtime, not just the framework surfaceExpert-level Entity Framework Core, including migrations, query performance tuning, and knowing when to drop to raw SQLDeep understanding of asynchronous and concurrent programming in .NET, including async/await pitfalls, cancellation, and thread-pool behaviourAt least 2 years leading engineering teams, with direct experience managing, mentoring, and developing engineersDemonstrated ability to design and deliver within an existing architecture, including reading unfamiliar codebases quickly and respecting established patternsExperience leading a dedicated or embedded delivery team inside a client's environment, processes, and repositoriesTrack record running sprint delivery without a separate delivery manager - refinement through retrospectiveProduction experience with a workflow orchestration engine (Temporal strongly preferred; Cadence, Camunda, or Step Functions considered)Strong grasp of event-driven architecture and pub/sub messaging patternsPractical experience implementing authentication and authorization for multi-tenant or role-sensitive applications using OAuth 2.0 and OpenID ConnectStrong relational data modelling skills in PostgreSQL, with an understanding of when analytical workloads justify a separate storeExperience with CI/CD pipelines and release process, ideally in GitLabConfidence communicating technical decisions directly to non-technical client stakeholdersMust be located in British Columbia, CanadaTechnologies Core: C#, .NET Core, ASP.NET Core, Entity Framework Core, worker services, asynchronous processing APIs: REST, OpenAPI/Swagger, API versioning strategies Orchestration and Integration:



Temporal workflows, integration services, event-driven pub/subData: PostgreSQL, ClickHouse, relational data modelling, reporting and analytics dataIdentity and Authorization: Keycloak, OpenFGA, OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, SSO, role- and policy-based authorizationTesting: xUnit/NUnit, Moq, Testcontainers, unit, integration and API testing, Playwright end-to-end testingEngineering and Collaboration: GitLab, GitLab CI/CD, CodeRabbit automated code review, Jira, Jira Product Discovery, Jira Service Management, ConfluenceFrontend context: Next.Js, React, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS, Shadcn/UI, component-driven developmentNice-to-HaveWorking fluency in Next.Js, React, and TypeScript - enough to review frontend code and unblock the teamExperience leading teams that include embedded BA and QA capability, rather than developers onlySaaS product delivery experience, particularly through a pilot-to-GA transitionHands-on Temporal experience, including workflow versioning and testing strategiesFamiliarity with fine-grained authorization models (Zanzibar-style / ReBAC) beyond OpenFGA specificallyExperience with ClickHouse schema design, materialized views, or high-cardinality analyticsBackground in Domain-Driven Design and bounded context definitionExperience with CQRS and event sourcing patternsExperience with Canadian public-sector or education data privacy requirements (PIPEDA, provincial FIPPA), including data residency considerationsConsulting or agency experience delivering to external clientsExperience running Jira Service Management as part of a support or run modelWho you areYou are a pragmatic engineer who makes decisions with incomplete information, documents the reasoning, and revisits them when the evidence changes. You lead by raising the capability of the people around you, and you would rather ship a well-understood system than a clever one nobody else can maintain. You treat a feature as incomplete until it is tested, documented, and supportable - finishing the code is the middle of the job, not the end.What Appnovation OffersChallenging and rewarding work with real impactDirect Access to Cutting-Edge AI PlatformsDiverse and Inclusive CultureGrowth opportunities for personal and professional developmentA collaborative and innovative work environment where your ideas are valuedExposure to exciting projects and high-profile clientsSupportive work environment with access to company leadersHybrid working modelThank you for your interest in a career with Appnovation Technologies!At Appnovation, we recognize that diverse teams are the strongest teams. Diversity, Equity & Inclusion is not only something that we embrace - we celebrate it! We are proud to be an Equal Prospect Employer and we encourage applicants from all backgrounds, lived experiences and industries to apply. Come join us at Appnovation, and learn more about how we stay true to our company values as we build better lives through better digital.Accommodations are available upon request throughout the recruitment process.

📌 Senior Technical Lead (Vancouver)
🏢 Appnovation
📍 Vancouver