Director of Engineering, Banking

Questrade Financial Group•Toronto, ON

9d•Hybrid

About The Position

Questrade Financial Group (QFG) is seeking a Director of Engineering, Banking to provide cross-functional management focused on delivering world-class engineering solutions in full-service digital banking. This seasoned leader will enable the establishment of high-performing technical teams and oversee engineering teams responsible for delivering technology products, particularly in Digital & Core Banking. The role involves implementing innovative approaches to ensure team performance and collaborating with product and other teams to fulfill Questrade's mission of helping Canadians become more financially successful and secure. The Director will contribute to the technology strategy and execution powering the bank's operations and customer experiences, overseeing the development and maintenance of banking platforms from core systems to customer-facing mobile apps. This requires a blend of technical expertise, strategic leadership, and a deep understanding of the financial services industry.

Requirements

At least 10 years experience working through the development, release cycle, and delivering software products to market.
Minimum of 10 years of demonstrated ability to manage and develop high-performing design and development teams.
Advanced expertise with modern practices of Agile, SAFe, DevOps, SRE, Chapters, and the application to large-scale complex technology organizations.
A proven track record of successfully leading complex, multidisciplinary talent teams in new endeavors and delivering solutions.
Broad knowledge of current and emerging technologies, technology directions, and strategic application to business needs, including the ability to differentiate between a relevant trend and hype.
Deep industry expertise and experience through a technology lens.
A proven track record of successfully maintaining a deep understanding of enterprise direction, goals, and industry and leading teams in alignment with business and IT strategies.
Strong business acumen and business planning skills.
Very strong appreciation for the complexities of service delivery for highly regulated businesses.
Ability to improve operational efficiency, service delivery, and information management across the IT organization.
Energized when faced with ambiguity and uncertainty.
Manages the risk that comes with moving forward when the outcome isn't certain and leads others to adapt quickly to changing conditions.
Readily distinguishes between what’s relevant and what’s unimportant to make sense of complex situations.
Analyzes multiple and diverse sources of information to define problems accurately before moving to solutions.
Fearlessness in suggesting or backing big ideas. Tenacity in focusing on the information discovery process.
Sets and accomplishes challenging goals in alignment with high standards.
Pursues everything with energy, drive, and the need to finish.
Persists in the face of challenges and setbacks.
Competes resourcefully, and takes calculated risks to achieve results.
Outstanding analytical and problem-solving abilities.
Excellent oral and written communication skills, including the ability to explain technology solutions in business terms, establish rapport and persuade others.
Shares ideas in a compelling manner that gains interest and commitment from others.
Adjusts communication content and style to meet the needs of various stakeholders.
Models and encourages the expression of diverse ideas and opinions.
Maintains strong relationships with recognized experts and with decision-makers inside and outside the work environment.
Creates a positive and motivating working environment.
Makes people feel that their contributions are visible and valued.
Lead others to view mistakes as opportunities to learn.
Creates a feeling of belonging and strong team morale.
Propels continuous improvement in engineering practices; has a knack for identifying and seizing opportunities for synergy and integration.

Responsibilities

Direct the architecture and development of critical banking platforms, including core banking systems, digital banking channels, data platforms, and APIs.
Drive the strategic roadmap for platform modernization, including cloud adoption and the integration of new technologies like Generative AI.
Build, mentor, and lead high-performing engineering teams.
Foster a culture of innovation, accountability, and continuous improvement.
Translate business goals and regulatory requirements into a clear and executable engineering strategy.
Ensure the end-to-end delivery of technical projects, from concept to deployment.
Uphold the highest standards of security, resilience, and regulatory compliance across all technology platforms.
Collaborate with cybersecurity, risk, and fraud teams to protect the bank's assets and customers.
Partner with product, business, operations and other technology teams to align solutions with business needs and deliver a seamless experience for customers.
Contribute to key strategic decisions about the bank's core system—the central nervous system that manages accounts, transactions, and customer data.
Lead the teams through a multi-year continuous improvement lifecycle on cloud-native platforms like Temenos or HPS.
Ensure public-facing applications (web and mobile apps) provide a seamless, secure, and intuitive user experience.
Stay current with technologies that enable features like contactless payments, digital wallets, and biometric authentication.
Architect systems that collect, store, and analyze data to provide a 360-degree view of the customer.
Implement data warehouses, data lakes, and analytics tools that power personalized insights, fraud detection, and risk management.
Build API gateways and integration layers that enable partnerships while maintaining strict security protocols.
Lead the move to the cloud (e.g., AWS, Google Cloud, Azure).
Evaluate and champion the adoption of new technologies that can improve the bank's platforms, including Generative AI and Robotic Process Automation (RPA).
Design and build systems that support a 'composable' architecture where different services can be swapped in and out.
Ensure all platforms and their components adhere to stringent regulatory requirements.
Manage operational risk, credit risk, and financial crime prevention (e.g., Anti-Money Laundering).
Implement robust security measures, including encryption, threat detection, and incident response plans.
Ensure the bank's platforms are protected from cyber threats and data breaches.
Ensure that the bank's platforms are highly available and can recover quickly from any disruptions.
Build fault-tolerant systems, implement disaster recovery plans, and conduct regular resilience testing.
Be a forward-thinking technologist who is continuously researching new approaches to problems and discussing them with others.
Maintain a view and provide visibility into the engineering roadmaps and milestones to executive stakeholders.
Provide leadership support to teams implementing and testing customer-facing and internal web and mobile applications.
Support teams in continuously improving their applications’ functionality, scalability, and maintainability, including the proper management of technical debt.
Provide support and expertise for a complex and hybrid (cloud and on-premises) infrastructure environment.
Meet regularly and interact productively with a diverse team of business stakeholders, user interface and experience designers, architects, engineers as needed to elicit, define, analyze and document requirements and principles for new applications.
Support technical leaders in defining technical requirements to facilitate development, testing, implementation, and ongoing support of applications.
Lead the support efforts of the applications built-in production, addressing issues in a timely fashion, respecting agreed-upon service level objectives.
Be an active voice in defining and implementing best practices, standards, and procedures including quality and delivery methodologies.
Ensure compliance with the documented software processes and procedures throughout the life cycle of software products.
Make sure that code written within scoped teams is reviewed and tested appropriately.
Conducts research and proof of concepts, ensuring the value is documented and socialized.
Assist teams with sharing knowledge and lessons learned with others in the organization.
Apply significant knowledge of the technology industry trends to help Questrade improve and build innovative products.
Provide support and expertise for a multi-tier environment; evaluation (with recommendations) for any additional infrastructure or software required to support the scoped application.
Lead design and engineering team leads to continually improve adoption of Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) best practices and methodologies.
Streamline and enhance the software development life-cycle (SDLC) to ensure the design and implementation planning, execution, and reporting is effective, efficient, standardized, coordinated, and integrated.
Govern the production of all required project artifacts produced by the team.
Manage multiple development teams across all locations and ensure alignment with departmental processes and standards.
Determine requirements for the team budget including all required resources (staff, hardware, tools, etc.).
Measure the effectiveness of the engineering team capabilities with consideration of quality and timeliness of deliverables.
Govern the selection & configuration of engineering tools. Organize tool-training, usage, and deployment.
Align all efforts according to Questrade Strategy and Enterprise Alignment.
Ensure the timely investigation and troubleshooting of technical production incidents and provide support enhancements/resolution to scoped applications in a timely and accurate manner.
Contribute to the setup and maintenance of a framework of application solutions to proactively monitor production systems and report any inconsistencies or potential problems.
Manage access permissions for direct reports on all relevant systems and environments.
Ensure identified security vulnerabilities are resolved in a timely fashion.
Contribute to the integrity, availability, and confidentiality of Questrade electronic data, client information, and systems.
Govern staff to ensure compliance with security and regulatory operating policies for computing and information technology.
Participate in the composition of scheduled releases and collaborate with production control on the tools and methodologies for effective and efficient code releases to production.
Approve all production Change Requests (CRs) and Emergency Change Requests (ECRs) relating to scoped applications.
Identify any production risks pertaining to the scoped applications developed by the team.
Manage the team of people who comprise the Digital Banking Engineering group.
Align engineering teams and individual goals to the organization’s strategic goals.
Forecast resourcing needs based on strategic goals, to ensure those are met.
Be resourceful and elaborate alternative plans to address hiring needs if there are challenges fulfilling them.
Be an advocate for the teams, removing efficiency blockers, and helping them get the tools and processes they need to be high performing.
Provide mentoring to team members to assist them in reaching their career goals.
Address team member performance issues in a timely manner.
Maintains a robust workforce of well-qualified IT professionals and develop a performance-oriented culture.
Fuel a passion within the team for designing and building innovative products.
Facilitate a work environment that fosters and supports ethical decision-making and actions.
Support the Enterprise Delivery Framework, estimate the scope and costs associated with new initiatives to ensure ROI analysis is performed and the results are used to prioritize investment.
Actively contribute to the development of Questbank’s project delivery capability — continually building and enhancing its ability to efficiently deliver quality solutions for complex and challenging projects.
Maintain a program view for all active projects and the associated resource allocation within the scoped team.
Regular reporting on project activities and resource allocation.
Identify any project or program risks pertaining to the projects led by the scoped team.