Team Lead — Senior Developer

Team Lead — Senior Developer | Maintenance & Transition | Montreal

About Neova

For over 25 years, Neova has supported Quebec and Ontario businesses with customized integrated business solutions. Our flagship product, Neovation, is an ERP designed to adapt to each client's processes—not the other way around. It currently serves producers, importers, processors, distributors, and packagers of perishable products, as well as specialized industrial distribution and tooling companies.

We are in the process of rewriting Neovation from scratch on a modern stack. Meanwhile, dozens of clients are using the old version in production every day. This position exists to ensure these clients are in good hands—and to bridge the gap between what exists and what's coming.

Your Role

You lead the team maintaining Neovation legacy: you manage bug fixes, client-requested improvements, and daily priorities. In parallel, you actively contribute to new development—you are the bridge between the two worlds, the one who understands the business logic encoded in the legacy and helps transfer it correctly to the new architecture.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead the maintenance team: coach developers daily, prioritize tickets, arbitrate emergencies, and maintain a reliable delivery pace.
• Ensure the quality of legacy Neovation fixes and enhancements: code reviews, regression testing, client deployment management.
• Collaborate directly with clients to understand their needs, explain chosen solutions, and support them during updates and implementations.
• Read, understand, and document the business logic in VisualFoxPro legacy code—accounting, payroll, inventory management, pricing rules—to enable its faithful transfer to the new stack.
• Contribute to new development (NestJS, TypeORM, MySQL, Vue 3) on modules you know deeply from the legacy.
• Coordinate with the new architecture team to ensure decision consistency and avoid recreating past mistakes.
• Establish best practices within the maintenance team: code standards, QA processes, branch management, documentation.
• Plan and oversee incremental technological migration projects: identify what can be moved, in what order, without breaking production.
• Stay alert for production incidents and coordinate rapid response when a client is impacted.
• Desired Profile

Requirements

• 5+ years of software development experience, including at least 2 years in a lead, senior, or technical reference role in a maintenance or product evolution context.
• Expertise in a web programming language—PHP, Node.js, Python, or similar.
• Strong SQL and MySQL skills: complex queries, modeling, database optimization.
• Demonstrated team leadership experience: you have managed priorities, given feedback, and delivered on schedules.
• Ability to read and understand legacy code to extract business logic—regardless of the technology, you're not afraid to open an old codebase.
• Professional French—written and spoken—you communicate daily with the team and French-speaking clients.
• Autonomy and sense of responsibility in a small, non-hierarchical team.

Considerable Assets

• Knowledge of VisualFoxPro or a similar legacy environment (FoxBASE, Clipper, Delphi, Progress)—being able to read VFP is a major advantage for this role.
• Experience in an ERP, accounting, distribution, or payroll domain: knowledge of concepts (general ledger, reconciliation, debit/credit, inventory management, QST/GST, Quebec payroll).
• Experience with NestJS, TypeORM, or Vue 3—or a clear willingness to quickly learn them.
• Experience in multi-tenant architecture or progressive legacy system migration to a modern stack.
• Knowledge of Agile/Scrum methodologies applied to a maintenance team.
• Mastery of Docker / docker-compose, CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, or equivalent).
• Experience with AI-assisted code generation tools (Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot)—you know how to use them without blindly trusting them.

Personal Profile

• Sense of responsibility: clients rely on you in production. You treat a production bug as an emergency and communicate before being asked.
• Field leadership: you raise the team's level by example, not by directives. A junior who works with you for 6 months is better than before.
• Pragmatism: in a legacy system, the perfect solution doesn't exist. You choose what delivers value without breaking what works.
• Curiosity for legacy: you see old code as a puzzle to understand, not as a burden to ignore. You know the business logic buried in it has value.
• Direct communication: you can speak to a non-technical client, explain why a fix takes time, and ask the right questions to understand a problem before coding.

What Neova Offers

• Salary: $95,000 to $115,000 CAD per year, with annual review.
• 4 weeks of vacation from day one.
• 1 day off for birthday
• 100% remote work
• Training and tooling budget (AI licenses, conferences, technical books).
• A concrete mandate: you keep production stable for real businesses while we build the next generation—your impact is immediate and measurable.
• Small team: no bureaucracy, quick decisions, real ownership.

Ready for new challenges? We absolutely want to meet you!

Salary: $95,000 to $115,000 per year

Location: Remote