Research and Development Director at Valsoft Corporation: 100% Remote (Montreal, QC, Canada)

Title: Research and Development (R&D) Director

Location: Montreal QC CA

Remoet

Job Description:

At ProgressionLIVE, we develop a web and mobile application that helps companies plan, manage, and track their field operations in real time. We specialize in HVAC, plumbing, and electrical work.

Our solution is used by hundreds of organizations across Canada. It supports diverse sectors such as construction, transportation, maintenance, and services. With ProgressionLIVE, our clients optimize their operations, reduce errors and paperwork, and increase team productivity. The result: a more enjoyable, seamless, and efficient customer and employee experience.

We are seeking an R&D Director to lead the engineering team and technical strategy at ProgressionLIVE. Reporting to the CEO, the successful candidate will be responsible for the platform, architecture, engineering team, and technical culture of the company.

The ideal candidate is a hands-on technical leader: equally comfortable with code and architecture as they are in the boardroom. They balance delivery velocity with long-term viability, make and defend key decisions, and build a development team recognized for the quality of its work.

Key responsibilities

Technical strategy and architecture

  • To hold the technical roadmap of the platform and translate it into concrete and executable engineering plans, aligned with business objectives.
  • Making and defending architectural decisions: when to refactor, when to deliver, when additional complexity is justified.
  • To evolve the Java backend (Spring + Hibernate) and the web frontend (Vue 3 / TypeScript) continuously, at scale and without interruption for customers.
  • Having the mobile strategy: design, versioning, backward compatibility between application versions, offline behavior and synchronization.
  • Ensuring the reliability, security and scalability of a multi-tenant SaaS operated on AWS (Elastic Beanstalk, EKS, Aurora MySQL, S3, SES, IAM).

Operational excellence and delivery

  • Establish and maintain modern engineering practices: CI/CD via GitHub Actions, IaC via Terraform, code review, automated testing, observability.
  • Manage the platform's security posture: SAST/DAST, tenant isolation, dependency management, API exposure.
  • Building a sound practice of monitoring, on-call and incident response.
  • Monitor key technical indicators: uptime, performance, code quality, velocity, technical debt.

Agentic AI and developer productivity

  • Lead the adoption of agentic AI tools throughout the development cycle: specifications, code generation, code review, testing, documentation, debugging, and incident response.
  • To guide developers, QA and DevOps in the practical use of tools such as Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot and MCP-based agents. To establish standards for responsible and efficient use.
  • Design and deliver agentic workflows that make up team productivity: automated PR review, test generation, dependency updates, security triage.
  • Identify high-leverage automation opportunities within engineering, and collaborate with the CEO and other teams on broader initiatives.

Team leadership

  • Recruit, mentor and develop the engineering team. Define standards, raise the bar, build a culture of craftsmanship and accountability.
  • Evolve the team structure in line with the company's growth.
  • Mobilize the team around clear objectives and measurable results.
  • Working closely with sales, customer success and support teams when technical decisions have a direct impact on customers.

Candidate Profile

Experience

  • More than 7 years of experience in software engineering, including at least 3 years in a technical leadership role (team leader, team manager, lead developer, software architect or equivalent).
  • Solid backend credibility. Able to read and reason about a Java monolith (Spring + Hibernate), understand its trade-offs, and lead a team that maintains and evolves it.
  • Strong frontend instincts. Proficiency in modern Vue or React ecosystems using TypeScript, sufficient to make architectural decisions and review work produced.
  • Extensive AWS experience: Elastic Beanstalk, EKS, Aurora, S3, SES, IAM, networking. Operation of a multi-tenant SaaS in production, with a clear opinion on the trade-offs between managed services, containers and serverless.
  • Experience in database design. Experience with Amazon Aurora MySQL or equivalent, with a focus on multi-tenant schema design and large-scale query performance.
  • Proficiency in CI/CD and IaC: GitHub Actions, Terraform, and what a pipeline actually looks like when it deploys to production.
  • Practical security background. Able to read a SAST/DAST report, sort vulnerabilities according to their actual risk, and lead the response.
  • Experience with mobile platforms. Understanding of the trade-offs between native and hybrid approaches, mobile API design and versioning, backward compatibility, offline behavior and synchronization.
  • Product awareness. Understanding that the best technical decisions are made to serve the user and the business. Experience in a product-driven environment.

AI agents

  • Demonstrated and hands-on use of agentic AI tools in your own daily work, not just as an executive sponsor. You speak credibly about prompt design, agent harnesses, MCP servers, and what works and what doesn't in production.
  • Experience in driving AI adoption within an engineering team, moving developers from curiosity to consistent and measurable productivity gains.

Leadership and operational style

  • Player-coach by default. You set the vision, then you sit down with the team to make it a reality.
  • Strong communicator across audiences: engineers, clients, management, partners.
  • Bias to deliver. You believe that progress comes from small, frequent, and reversible decisions.
  • High sense of accountability and ownership.

Bilingualism French / English (an important asset given our base in Quebec and our pan-Canadian clientele).

Additional advantages

  • Experience in field service management, logistics or operational planning.
  • Hands-on background in mobile development (native Android / iOS or hybrid: Cordova, Capacitor, React Native).
  • Familiarity with accounting system integrations (QuickBooks, Sage, Acomba or similar).

Our advantages (and they're worth checking out!)

At ProgressionLIVE, we believe that performance comes from well-being.

Here's what we're offering you:

  • 4-day week
  • Telework
  • Group insurance after 3 months (50% paid by the company, family option available)
  • Employee Assistance Program (EAP)
  • Corporate Medicine Program
  • Group RRSP (Group RRSP)
  • 3 weeks of vacation from the first year (available after 3 months)
  • Regular social and sporting activities
  • Annual budget for training
  • Annual personal budget (sports equipment or teleworking equipment)
  • Coffee, snacks and good cheer guaranteed at the office

#ProgressionLive

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