Director, Product Owner - Process Optimization - Simplii Financial

CIBC•Toronto, ON

2d•Hybrid

About The Position

At Simplii Financial, we're reshaping how millions of Canadians manage their finances. As the Director, Product Owner, Process Optimization, you'll lead the vision, roadmap, and priorities for Simplii’s Process Optimization squad. You’ll identify high-impact opportunities across core operational processes and guide the squad from discovery through delivery, with a focus on simplifying work, improving reliability, and creating better outcomes for clients and team members. A key priority in this role is using modernization as an opportunity to redesign how the bank operates, rather than replicating fragmented or manual legacy processes on new platforms. You’ll work across business, operations, technology, and control teams to design future-state processes that are efficient, scalable, and resilient. Throughout, you’ll bring strong business judgment, leadership, and a practical mindset that keeps the team focused on measurable progress.

Requirements

You bring deep business and operational insight. You understand how banking works across products, channels, operations, technology, risk, and enterprise partners. You can identify where the biggest process improvement opportunities exist and connect them to meaningful business outcomes.
You know how to turn ambiguity into action. You can take a broad or complex challenge and define a clear path forward, including priorities, sequencing, success measures, and practical next steps.
You have strong leadership and transformation experience. You bring experience leading teams, process optimization, business transformation, business architecture, operations improvement, or related cross-functional change in a complex organization. You’re confident shaping roadmaps and connecting delivery to measurable results.
You’re skilled in process design and continuous improvement. You have experience diagnosing operational pain points, mapping current-state processes, and designing better future states. You’re familiar with methods such as root-cause analysis, value-stream thinking, process mapping, process mining, service design, and continuous improvement.
You understand risk in a regulated environment. You have sound knowledge of risk, compliance, privacy, security, fraud, anti-money laundering, auditability, and operational resilience requirements. You apply this knowledge to ensure process improvements are both effective and appropriately controlled.
You influence across teams. You can build trust and alignment with senior leaders, subject matter experts, engineers, architects, operations partners, data teams, and control partners.
Analytical Thinking
Backlog Management
Communication
Data-Driven Decision Making
Domain Knowledge
Influencing Without Authority
Mentorship
Negotiation
Problem Solving
Product Portfolio Strategy
Product Roadmap Development
Risk Management
Sprint Planning
Stakeholder Management
User Story Mapping

Nice To Haves

Experience in banking, financial services, fintech, digital operations, consulting, or another regulated high-volume environment is strongly preferred
Exposure to modernization, workflow, APIs, automation, or AI-enabled operations is an asset.

Responsibilities

Set direction - Define the vision, roadmap, and backlog priorities for the Process Optimization squad. Make clear trade-off decisions that balance business value, client and employee impact, operational efficiency, risk reduction, and long-term simplification.
Drive process transformation - Lead the team in identifying operational pain points, mapping current-state processes, and designing practical future-state improvements. Increase straight-through processing, reduce manual effort, simplify handoffs, and improve reliability across core operational activities.
Envision and build a modern bank - Use Simplii’s modernization program to rethink from first principles how a modern digital bank should operate.
Advance automation and AI opportunities - Identify where automation, workflow tools, process mining, document intelligence, decision support, and artificial intelligence can improve speed, quality, controls, and resilience. Ensure solutions are practical, measurable, well-governed, and appropriate for a regulated banking environment.
Embed controls by design - Work closely with risk and control partners to build compliance, fraud, anti-money laundering, privacy, security, auditability, and operational resilience into processes from the start. Help shift from manual controls to preventative, automated, and data-informed controls.
Lead agile delivery - Break work into clear epics, stories, and sprint-level outcomes that create visible progress. Keep the squad aligned on priorities, accountable for delivery, and focused on outcomes that are adopted, measured, and connected to the broader operating model.

Benefits

competitive salary
incentive pay
banking benefits
a benefits program
defined benefit pension plan
an employee share purchase plan
a vacation offering
wellbeing support
MomentMakers, our social, points-based recognition program
Purpose Day; a paid day off dedicated for you to use to invest in your growth and development