Deputy Executive Director

Doctors Without Borders / Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) Canada•Toronto, ON

1d•Hybrid

About The Position

The Deputy Executive Director (Deputy) serves as the operational backbone of MSF Canada, ensuring that strategy translates into action across all departments while maintaining the organizational health, accountability, and cross-functional cohesion needed to deliver on MSF Canada's mission. By bridging leadership, operations, risk, and governance, this role amplifies the Executive Director's capacity and keeps the organization running with clarity and purpose. Internally and externally, the Deputy strengthens MSF Canada's credibility as a well-managed, mission-aligned organization. MSF Canada is looking for someone who will be responsible to lead day-to-day operations, manage senior leaders, oversee risk and compliance, act as a strategic partner to the Executive Director, and represent and connect MSF Canada internally and externally.

Requirements

Genuine interest in, understanding of, and commitment to, the humanitarian principles and the social mission of MSF
Proficiency in spoken and written English and French
Culturally humble, equity-minded, and able to model inclusive leadership across a diverse organization
Demonstrated senior leadership experience in a complex, multi-stakeholder organization - nonprofit, humanitarian, or similarly mission-driven environment
Proven track record managing cross-functional teams and executive level direct reports
Ability to lead and develop high-performing teams, with a coaching and accountability-oriented approach
Extensive experience bridging departments and creating conditions for collaboration across an organization
Comfortable holding both strategic and operational responsibilities simultaneously
Strong organizational and process management skills, with experience running planning and reporting cycles
Ability to identify, assess, and mitigate organizational risk
Familiarity with financial oversight, IT governance, and/or legal and compliance functions
Good communicator in both internal leadership and public contexts where needed in support of the organization’s leadership

Responsibilities

Drive organizational effectiveness across departments, by leading the planning and accountability cycle
Directly oversee Finance and Administration, IT, Human Resources, Strategy and Planning, while building team capacity through coaching, accountability and cross functional collaboration.
Maintain organizational readiness through critical incident preparedness, risk registry management, and oversight and cross functional risk mitigation of MSF Canada's legal and data privacy obligations. Ensure compliance across Finance, HR, and IT, including data privacy, legal obligations, and safeguarding casework (with high‑impact cases escalated to the ED). Lead operational risk response within agreed thresholds.
Act as the ED’s strategic partner, ensuring alignment between internal operations and external/movement‑facing priorities. Providing operational insight for governance reporting, Board engagement, and organizational health monitoring. Ensuring the ED has a clear line of sight into culture signals, safeguarding patterns, risk, and performance.
Support the Executive Director in representing MSF Canada internally and externally, preparing the organization for engagements with the movement and the public, and connecting internal teams, the Association, and governance bodies to strengthen MSF Canada's cohesion, credibility, and networks.