SWIFT Escalation Engineering Team Lead

Position: SWIFT Escalation Engineering Team Lead
Location: Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

Move Security Forward with Acre
Are you passionate about transforming the future of security? Do you thrive in a collaborative, innovative environment where your contributions drive real impact? If so, Acre Security is the place for you. Join us in making the world a safer place — one innovation at a time.

About Acre
At Acre, we're not just building security solutions — we’re empowering security professionals to adapt and thrive in a rapidly changing world. Since our inception in 2012, Acre has been at the forefront of innovation in access control, visitor management, and intrusion software. Our solutions are trusted by organizations in over 25 countries, delivering smarter, more adaptable, and easier-to-use security technologies that protect what matters most.

Your Impact
The SWIFT Escalation Engineering Team Lead will stand up, build, and lead the day to day operations of a new remote team of senior advanced software development and quality assurance professionals based in Ottawa, Canada. The team will provide a dedicated sustaining engineering path for complex customer escalations and software defects that require engineering investigation, code correction, validation, controlled release, and integration into the main product line.

This role combines hands on team leadership, sustaining engineering operations, quality ownership, and delivery management. The Team Lead will be the primary point of contact for the SWIFT team and will connect Tier 3 Technical Support, Software Engineering, Quality Assurance, Product Management, Release Management, and Research and Development so that urgent customer issues move through a clear, accountable, and technically sound resolution process.

The successful candidate will create the operating model, establish team standards and delivery routines, recruit and onboard capability as required, manage daily execution, and develop a culture that values urgency, engineering discipline, collaboration, and long-term product reliability. Experience performing Agile Delivery Lead responsibilities is a significant advantage.

What You’ll Do

Team Stand Up and Operational Leadership

• Establish the SWIFT team structure, operating rhythms, roles, responsibilities, decision paths, and working agreements for a remote senior engineering and quality team.
• Lead the day to day operation of the team, including work assignment, capacity planning, technical coordination, priority management, risk review, and delivery follow through.
• Participate in recruiting, selection, onboarding, and capability development for senior software developers and quality assurance professionals.
• Create clear expectations for ownership, responsiveness, engineering quality, documentation, collaboration, and customer focus.
• Build an effective remote team culture through regular communication, transparent decisions, shared accountability, and deliberate connection across functions and locations.
• Coach team members, support professional growth, address performance or delivery concerns promptly, and maintain a high standard of execution.

Sustaining Engineering and Quality Assurance

• Own the operational path for software defects accepted into the SWIFT Escalation Engineering backlog.
• Coordinate work from Tier 3 escalation intake and technical qualification through investigation, code correction, peer review, quality validation, release approval, customer validation, closure, and mainline integration.
• Ensure incoming issues include sufficient evidence, reproduction steps, logs, diagnostics, affected versions, environment details, customer impact, and acceptance criteria before engineering work begins.
• Partner with senior developers and quality assurance to define investigation approaches, test strategies, regression coverage, and release readiness criteria.
• Maintain appropriate engineering, security, quality, and release controls while helping the team respond with urgency to high impact customer situations.
• Ensure fixes are documented, traceable, validated against the reported condition, and considered for broader product impact before release.
• Promote root cause analysis, defect prevention, test automation, reusable diagnostics, and knowledge transfer into Technical Support and the broader engineering organization.

Agile Delivery and Execution

• Own the SWIFT Jira planning structure, including Epics, Stories, Bugs, Tasks, priorities, dependencies, acceptance criteria, assignments, and delivery status.
• Establish and facilitate backlog refinement, sprint planning, daily stand ups, technical reviews, release readiness reviews, sprint demonstrations, and retrospectives.
• Maintain a clear, prioritized backlog using customer impact, severity, reproducibility, contractual considerations, engineering effort, release risk, and available capacity.
• Partner with developers and quality assurance to estimate work, evaluate capacity, and establish achievable delivery commitments.
• Identify and remove organizational, technical, process, communication, and dependency barriers that slow customer resolution.
• Maintain visibility of delivery risks, unresolved technical decisions, resource constraints, and dependencies that may affect customer outcomes or release quality.
• Provide reliable status, decision, and risk visibility to Global Technical Support, Product Management, Research and Development, and other stakeholders.

Cross Functional Leadership and Primary Point of Contact

• Serve as the main point of contact for SWIFT team operations, priorities, delivery status, risks, and cross functional coordination.
• Create a strong working interface with Tier 3 Technical Support so customer escalations are qualified, prioritized, and communicated consistently.
• Coordinate with Product Management and Research and Development on product ownership, technical direction, fix strategy, release path, and mainline integration.
• Facilitate timely decisions when ownership, priority, scope, or release risk is unclear.
• Translate complex technical status into clear, factual updates for technical and nontechnical stakeholders without overcommitting the team.
• Protect customer continuity by ensuring handoffs, ownership, and next actions remain clear throughout the resolution lifecycle.

Continuous Improvement and Governance

• Define and monitor practical operating measures for backlog health, delivery predictability, engineering throughput, escaped defects, validation quality, aging, and customer resolution progress.
• Use retrospectives, root cause findings, and delivery data to improve intake quality, engineering methods, test coverage, release practices, and stakeholder communication.
• Maintain team documentation, workflow standards, decision records, technical knowledge, and reusable operating procedures.
• Identify recurring product or support patterns and ensure insights are routed to the appropriate Product, Engineering, Quality, and Support owners.
• Balance urgent customer recovery with sustainable engineering practices and long term product stability.

What You'll Bring
To succeed in this role, you'll need:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Technology, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• Experience leading or building a software engineering, sustaining engineering, escalation engineering, or quality assurance team in an enterprise software environment.
• Experience managing senior technical professionals in a remote or distributed team model.
• Strong understanding of the software development lifecycle, defect investigation, source control, peer review, testing, release management, and production support.
• Proven ability to coordinate complex customer impacting software issues across Support, Engineering, Quality Assurance, Product, and Release stakeholders.
• ​​​​​​​Experience using Jira to manage software delivery work, priorities, dependencies, defects, and status.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills with the ability to explain technical conditions, risk, and delivery status to technical and nontechnical audiences.
• Demonstrated leadership in prioritization, conflict resolution, risk mitigation, obstacle removal, and decision facilitation.
• Ability to work effectively from Ottawa, Ontario, while leading a remote team and collaborating across global time zones.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience serving as an Agile Delivery Lead, Scrum Master, Engineering Manager, Technical Program Lead, or similar software delivery role.
• Certified ScrumMaster, Professional Scrum Master, PMI Agile Certified Practitioner, or comparable Agile delivery credential.
• Hands on software engineering background with one or more of the following: C#, Python, SQL, Flutter, MongoDB, RESTful APIs, webhooks, or event driven integrations.
• Experience with cloud platforms such as Microsoft Azure or Amazon Web Services and delivery tooling such as GitHub Actions, Jenkins, Docker, or Kubernetes.
• Experience establishing quality practices, automated testing, regression strategies, release gates, and defect prevention methods.
• Experience with access control, identity, physical security, or other software used in security critical customer environments.
• ​​​​​​​Experience supporting hotfix, maintenance release, and mainline integration workflows across multiple product versions.

What’s in It for You
We strive to do more than just match your ambitions — when you join Acre, you’ll have access to a range of exciting opportunities:

• Be part of a disruptor – Help move security forward with a company that challenges the status quo and redefines industry standards.
• Learn from industry leaders – Work alongside experts and innovators driving real change in security technology.
• Drive meaningful impact – Your work will directly contribute to pioneering security technologies that protect businesses and communities worldwide.
• Advance your career – Access professional development opportunities, including training programs, mentorship, and industry events.
• Enjoy competitive rewards – We offer a competitive compensation package, performance-based incentives, and a comprehensive benefits program that reflects your contributions.

Join the Future of Security
At Acre, we’re moving security forward. If you're ready to make an impact in a fast-moving, innovative industry, we’d love to hear from you.

Acre is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees.
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