Quick Summary
Team Lead — Senior Developer | Maintenance & Transition | Montreal
About Neova
For over 25 years, Neova has been supporting businesses in Quebec and Ontario 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. Today, it serves producers, importers, processors, distributors, and packagers of perishable products, as well as companies specializing in industrial distribution and tooling.
We are currently rewriting Neovation from scratch on a modern stack. Meanwhile, dozens of clients use the legacy version in production every day. This position exists to ensure these clients are in good hands — and to build the bridge between what exists and what is to come.
Your Role
You will lead the team that maintains legacy Neovation: you manage bug fixes, client-requested improvements, and daily priorities. In parallel, you actively contribute to the new development — you are the bridge between the two worlds, the one who understands the business logic encoded in the legacy system and helps transfer it correctly to the new architecture.
Key Responsibilities:
- Lead the maintenance team: mentor developers daily, prioritize tickets, arbitrate emergencies, and maintain a reliable delivery pace.
- Ensure the quality of bug fixes and evolutions of legacy Neovation: code reviews, regression testing, deployment management at client sites.
- 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 of legacy VisualFoxPro code — accounting, payroll, inventory management, pricing rules — to enable its faithful transfer to the new stack.
- Contribute to the new development (NestJS, TypeORM, MySQL, Vue 3) on modules you know in depth from the legacy system.
- Coordinate with the new architecture team to ensure consistency in decisions and avoid recreating past mistakes.
- Establish best practices within the maintenance team: code standards, QA processes, branch management, documentation.
- Plan and supervise incremental technological migration projects: identify what can be moved, in what order, without breaking production.
- Be on the lookout for production incidents and coordinate rapid response when a client is impacted.
Required Skills & Experience:
Requirements
- 5+ years of experience in software development, including at least 2 years in a lead, senior, or technical reference role in a product maintenance or evolution context in production.
- Expertise in a web programming language – PHP, Node.js, Python, or similar.
- Solid mastery of SQL and MySQL: complex queries, modeling, database optimization.
- Demonstrated experience in team leadership: you have managed priorities, given feedback, and delivered within deadlines.
- Ability to read and understand legacy code to extract business logic — regardless of the technology, you are 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 team, without the structure of a large organization.
Major Assets
- Knowledge of VisualFoxPro or a similar legacy environment (FoxBASE, Clipper, Delphi, Progress…) — knowing how to read VFP is a major advantage for this position.
- Experience in ERP, accounting, distribution, or payroll: knowledge of concepts (general ledger, reconciliation, debit/credit, inventory management, GST/QST, Quebec payroll).
- Experience with NestJS, TypeORM, or Vue 3 — or a clear willingness to learn them quickly.
- Experience in multi-tenant architecture or progressive migration from legacy systems 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 trusting them blindly.
Personal Profile
- Sense of responsibility: clients rely on you in production. You treat a production bug as an emergency and communicate before being asked.
- Hands-on leadership: you raise the team's level by example, not by directives. A junior working with you for 6 months becomes better than before.
- Pragmatism: in a legacy system, the perfect solution does not exist. You choose what delivers value without breaking what works.
- Curiosity for legacy: you see old code as a puzzle to understand, not a burden to ignore. You know that the business logic buried within it has value.
- Direct communication: you know how to 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 You:
- Salary: $95,000 to $115,000 CAD depending on experience, with annual review.
- 3 weeks of vacation from start.
- 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 future — your impact is immediate and measurable.
- Small team: no bureaucracy, fast decisions, real ownership.
Ready for new challenges? We absolutely want to meet you!
Compensation: $95,000.00 to $115,000.00 per year
Job Location: Remote work