Director of Engineering, Innovation

Royal Bank of Canada•Toronto, ON

2d•Onsite

About The Position

The Director of Engineering, Innovation leads RBC's enterprise Innovation team's engineering function within Technology & Operations. This team is responsible for taking emerging technologies from discovery to scaled, secure, production-grade capabilities. This role spans lines of business and partners closely with Enterprise Architecture, Global Security, Data & AI, and Digital channels, stewarding a high-performing engineering team. You will own the end-to-end innovation delivery lifecycle—problem discovery, rapid prototyping, pilot, and hand-off—ensuring alignment with RBC strategy, target-state architecture, and risk and regulatory standards.

Requirements

Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science/Engineering (or equivalent).
Proven experience with rapid prototyping software development skills across a broad range of technologies (7+ years) with 5+ years managing senior engineers.
Proven track record taking innovations from PoC to production at enterprise scale (high availability, performance, security, observability).
Highly flexible attitude, as part of a team with a rapidly changing pipeline of work, every day is interesting, but we can’t guarantee any particular tech / task
Ability to work with minimal supervision or assistance
Able to communicate with other technical teams to help promote emerging technologies.
Deep hands-on knowledge of cloud (Azure/AWS/GCP), Kubernetes, microservices, APIs, modern SDLC.
Experience with data & AI platforms (MLOps, feature stores, model governance) and guardrails for GenAI/LLMs in regulated environments.
Strong technology strategy, portfolio management, and financial acumen; able to balance experimentation with risk, cost, and value.
Excellent stakeholder management and communication skills.

Nice To Haves

Graduate degree in a related field.
Experience in large-scale, global financial services; familiarity with regulatory and model risk frameworks, or equivalent experience running successful products and services in an app-dev setup or startup environment.
Open-source contributions, patents/publications; experience with venture/startup ecosystems.
Design Thinking/human-centred design; product management exposure.

Responsibilities

Define and execute on the enterprise Innovation strategy and multi-year roadmap that converts business opportunities into scalable platforms and services.
Stand up and mature reusable capabilities (e.g., developer experience tooling, experimentation sandboxes, MLOps/GenAI guardrails) that accelerate delivery for product teams.
Lead the discovery-to-delivery pipeline: ideation, proofs of concept, pilots, and scaled rollouts; establish stage gates, success metrics, and benefit realisation.
Embed engineering excellence: SDLC and architecture compliance, privacy-by-design and responsible AI.
Partner with Lines of Business, Enterprise Architecture, Security, Risk, Data/AI, and Digital channels to prioritise demand and ensure alignment.
Manage vendor and startup ecosystem relationships; evaluate, select, and negotiate with technology partners; drive cost/benefit and outcomes.
Build, coach, and inspire a diverse team; attract top talent; develop succession and capability plans; foster a culture of experimentation, learning, and delivery.
Establish OKRs and KPIs (time-to-first‑value, reuse/adoption, reliability, cost efficiency), report progress to senior leadership.
Oversee budgets, portfolio governance, and program execution to deliver outcomes on time, scope, and budget.
Ensure compliance with regulatory requirements, model risk and information security controls; manage audits and remediation.