SJC stands as Canada’s largest privately owned communications company, distinguished by its portfolio of leading media brands, including Toronto Life, Chatelaine, and Maclean’s. A dynamic and influential organization within the industry, SJC excels in the creation, publication, and production of best-in-class content through its comprehensive content and creative studios, advanced advertising technology, and state-of-the-art print facilities. We collaborate with clients across North America to deliver innovative marketing solutions that effectively inform, inspire, and empower audiences across all platforms. With significant reach and influence, SJC has proudly been recognized as one of Canada’s Best Managed Companies for 22 consecutive years, a testament to our commitment to excellence. To learn more about our organization, please visit www.stjoseph.com .

About the Role

Our Center of Excellence team is seeking a Senior Engineering Manager to lead the engineering function for our Communications Group. This leader will be responsible for developing a strong engineering culture, driving top-level company objectives, creating scalable systems that directly affect the client and user experience, and partnering cross-functionally to drive business outcomes. They will leverage AI as a multiplier to make our teams more productive.

You’ll identify key engineering-wide, org-level strategic technical initiatives and set the tone for overall engineering excellence. This role will lead a shared service function with your leadership impacting all products & engineering functions. The CoE’s high level mission is to enable product, content and monetization to succeed for all stakeholders across SJC. Leading our engineering function, you will define technical priorities, drive architectural decisions, and collaborate closely with product, editorial, and cross-functional teams to deliver high-impact solutions that maximize value for our users. This role requires a proven track record of managing and hiring engineers, strategic thinking, individual code contribution, leveraging AI tools, and direct stakeholder engagement.

What You’ll Do in this Role:

Build and nurture a high-performing engineering team: Hire, mentor, and empower engineers at all levels while fostering a culture grounded in trust, teamwork, clear expectations, accountability, and continuous improvement.

Tackle and resolve the toughest challenges: Own end-to-end delivery of complex, high-impact initiatives by coordinating cross-functional stakeholders—product, editorial, monetization strategy, and individual contributors—to drive measurable business outcomes.

Define and communicate our technical vision: Establish the roadmap for critical systems, core product abstractions, and developer productivity tools, ensuring every engineer understands our priorities for quality, speed, and scalability.

Champion organizational adoption of AI: Lead process improvements, structural shifts, and adoption of AI-powered tools, products and agents—guiding teams and leaders through transitions so they can embrace new ways of working effectively.

Collaborate on product strategy: Partner closely with product managers, designers, and other partners to map out long-term technical and platform goals, then break those goals into actionable milestones with clear success criteria.

Design, build, and own innovative solutions: Enable your team to architect and develop new platform and product features using modern frameworks (TypeScript, React, Node.js) and AI technologies, taking ownership from prototype through production.

Ensure architectural robustness: Drive technical design discussions, offer thoughtful guidance on system architecture, and validate that every service we ship is reliable, scalable, and aligned with our business objectives.

Stay hands-on in the codebase: Balance leadership responsibilities with a genuine passion for coding—contributing code alongside your team to maintain both technical credibility and a deep understanding of our product.

Our ideal candidate:

• Experienced engineering lead: 8+ years in software engineering (incl. 3+ years people management) with a track record of recruiting, scaling, mentoring, and retaining high-performing teams.

• Strategic executor: Customer-obsessed with a bias for action; expertly balances long-, medium-, and short-term trade-offs to drive technical strategy and organizational outcomes.

• Technical expert: Hands-on understanding of modern dev practices (Agile, CI/CD) and architecting scalable, resilient distributed systems.

• Cross-functional partner: Proven collaborator with PMs, designers, and peers to take products from 0 1, managing expectations and delivering impact while fostering transparency and operational excellence.

• Has experience

  • Owning shared product services: authentication, content APIs, ad‑tech, user engagement, personalization.
  • Shipping mobile web experiences: (Next.js, React, Node, TypeScript—plus the leading edge framework that emerges tomorrow).
  • Designing & delivering AI‑powered products: recommendation engines, content‑tagging, AI-assisted newsroom tools, AI dev tools.
  • Crushing performance & Core Web Vitals so ad viewability and subscription conversions soar.
  • Leading, coaching & hiring high‑impact engineers across front‑end, back‑end, DevOps.
  • Championing engineering culture: code quality, observability, threat modeling, blameless retrospectives.

Your Technical Skills Include:

• Education: A bachelor’s degree in Software Engineering, Computer Science, or equivalent.
• Front-end & frameworks: Proficient in JavaScript/TypeScript ecosystems (React, Next.js, Express, Node.js).
• Back-end & runtimes: Skilled in REST APIs, containerization (Docker, AWS ECR/ECS/Fargate), and serverless (AWS Lambda, Step Functions).
• Data stores: Strong with relational databases (MySQL/MariaDB, PostgreSQL); familiarity with NoSQL and column-store databases (e.g., ClickHouse) is a plus.
• Delivery & edge: Hands-on CI/CD (GitHub Actions, AWS CodeBuild) and CDN/edge computing (Cloudflare).
• Bonus: PHP and WordPress experience.

SJC Perks

• Health and Dental Benefits
• Employee & Family Assistance Program (EFAP) and online health & wellness resources with Homewood Health
• Scholarship program for employees’ children
• Exclusive employee magazine subscription rates
• Discounted annual GoodLife membership Perkopolis Perk Program and employee pricing at major retailers

Accommodations at SJC

SJC is an equal-opportunity employer. SJC is committed to inclusive, barrier-free recruitment and selection processes and work environments. If you are contacted for a job opportunity, please advise the Human Resources department if any accommodations are needed to ensure you have access to a fair and equitable process. Any information received relating to accommodation will be addressed confidentially.

Inclusion at SJC

Equality and respect for all is one of our founding values and core beliefs at SJC. We are a diverse group with associates of all ages, orientations, races and talents. We celebrate this diversity and we draw strength from it. Inclusivity at SJC means fostering a culture that welcomes and respects each individual as equal – both inside our walls and within the larger community.

If you are a highly motivated individual with a passion for creating exceptional experiences, we invite you to apply and contribute to our dynamic team. Please submit your resume detailing your relevant experience and why you are the ideal candidate for this role.