FVP, Head of Commercial Platform Development

Axos Bank • San Diego, CA

1d • Onsite

About The Position

Axos Bank is building its Commercial Banking platform from the ground up and this role owns the development. The Head of Commercial Platform Development (First Vice President) will be the founding technical leader for a net-new platform designed to serve Axos' commercial clients across treasury, cash management, fund banking, and complex commercial workflows. There is no legacy system to inherit. You are starting with a blank slate and the mandate to build it right. You will report to the Head of Software Engineering and serve as the direct technology counterpart to the Head of Commercial Digital Product. Together, you will co-own the Commercial platform roadmap, translating product strategy into architecture decisions, engineering plans, and scalable delivery execution. This is a builder role first: you will be close to the code, the design, and the team in the early phases, with a clear trajectory to lead a multi-team organization of 50–100+ engineers as the platform matures. The platform will be built on OutSystems as its low-code/high-productivity foundation, complemented by a purpose-built architecture for zero-latency operations, high-throughput event processing, and enterprise-grade reliability. If you have strong opinions about how to build financial platforms that perform at scale and the experience to back them up, this is the role!

Requirements

• 10+ years of software engineering experience
• 5+ years in a technical leadership role owning a product-grade platform end-to-end, not just managing a team, but owning the architecture
• Hands-on experience building or operating high-throughput, low-latency financial platforms payments, treasury, commercial banking, or adjacent domains
• Demonstrated experience as a platform founder or early technical leader: greenfield builds, 0-to-1 platform stand-ups, or major re-architecture programs
• Direct experience managing platform QA and APM as integrated engineering responsibilities
• Track record of growing an engineering organization: hiring, leveling, team structure design, and culture building at a leadership level
• OutSystems: practical experience building enterprise-grade applications on the OutSystems low-code platform, architecture patterns, performance tuning, integration design, and ODC vs. O11 tradeoffs
• Redis: production-grade Redis experience including cluster configuration, cache strategy design, pub/sub patterns, TTL management, and data consistency in distributed systems
• Zero-latency design: demonstrated experience architecting real-time financial applications, in-memory processing, connection pooling, async I/O, and latency profiling at the p99/p999 level
• Queuing technologies: hands-on experience with at least one enterprise message bus (Kafka, Azure Service Bus, RabbitMQ, or equivalent) topic design, consumer group management, backpressure handling, and dead-letter strategies
• APM tooling: experience selecting and implementing APM platforms (Dynatrace, Datadog, New Relic, AppDynamics, or equivalent) not just using dashboards, but owning the instrumentation strategy
• API design: strong command of RESTful and event-driven API patterns, versioning strategies, and gateway configuration in a multi-consumer financial platform context
• AI-assisted engineering: experience operationalizing LLM-based developer tooling (copilots, code review assistants, test generation) with practical governance for security, privacy, and auditability
• Cloud platforms: production experience on Azure or AWS containerized workloads, managed services, network security controls, and cloud cost management
• Builder mentality: you are energized by greenfield, not intimidated by it and you have a clear framework for making early architectural decisions with incomplete information
• Full ownership orientation: dev, QA, APM, and ops are not separate teams to you as they are all part of what it means to own a platform
• Comfortable scaling: you can work closely with a small team today while designing the org structure and processes that will support 10x headcount tomorrow
• Regulated industry comfort: you understand that building in a bank means security, audit trails, and compliance are architecture constraints, not afterthoughts
• Strong executive presence paired with engineering depth, credible with the commercial product team, the incoming Head of Software Engineering, and the C-suite equally

Nice To Haves

• Prior experience at a bank, credit union, or regulated fintech with direct exposure to commercial banking products (treasury, cash management, trade finance, or fund banking)
• OutSystems certification (Associate, Professional, or Expert) or equivalent demonstrable depth
• Experience with commercial treasury/cash management platforms (Fiserv, FIS, Kyriba, TreasuryXpress, HighRadius)
• Familiarity with fund banking workflows
• Experience with stablecoin infrastructure, tokenized deposits, or digital asset payment rails as an emerging capability area
• Prior experience reporting to or building alongside a newly hired engineering executive navigating the early days of a joint leadership build

Responsibilities

• Platform Architecture & Build: Design and own the end-to-end architecture of the Axos Commercial Banking ecosystem, including the Commercial Portal, industry specific solutions, API gateway layer, and integration fabric connecting to the online banking platform, core banking, and third-party fintech vendors.
• Establish foundational platform patterns: OutSystems application architecture, Redis-based caching and session management, message queuing topology, and API design standards.
• Architect for zero-latency: define real-time data flow patterns, in-memory processing strategies, and latency SLAs for transactional and treasury workflows.
• Design the event-driven backbone selecting and configuring queuing technologies (e.g., Kafka, Azure Service Bus, RabbitMQ) to support high-throughput commercial workflows including payments, approvals, and capital call processing.
• Establish integration patterns with online banking platform for SSO punch-out, transaction execution, and data synchronization ensuring clean separation between portal-owned surfaces and vendor-managed workflows.
• AI-Led Development & Engineering Productivity: Establish an AI-led development approach from day one standardizing how engineers use copilots/LLM tooling for design exploration, code generation, test creation, documentation, and refactoring.
• Implement guardrails for safe, compliant AI usage in a regulated environment: data handling rules, prompt hygiene, secrets management, and IP/open-source considerations.
• Build AI into the engineering system: AI-assisted code review and static analysis, automated test generation, release note drafting, and incident/RCAs summarization to increase throughput without lowering quality.
• Define measurable productivity and quality outcomes (e.g., cycle time, defect escape rate, change failure rate) and iterate on workflows, templates, and training to drive sustained adoption.
• Engineering Execution & Delivery: Lead a founding engineering team through platform stand-up: environment configuration, CI/CD pipeline construction, coding standards, and first production deployments.
• Own full-lifecycle delivery across development, QA, and release establishing quality gates, automated testing frameworks, and deployment processes from day one.
• Define and implement Application Performance Monitoring (APM) strategy: tooling selection, instrumentation standards, alerting thresholds, and incident response runbooks.
• Establish SRE practices appropriate to a regulated financial platform: SLOs, error budgets, on-call rotations, and post-incident review processes.
• Drive sprint cadence and delivery rhythm in close partnership with the Head of Commercial Digital Product maintaining a sustainable pace without sacrificing engineering quality.
• Data driven obsession to drive improvement and natural curiosity to uncover what’s next.
• Platform Operations Ownership: Own the platform in production as this role is not a handoff to an ops team; you are accountable for uptime, performance, and incident response across the commercial stack.
• Define and enforce observability standards: distributed tracing, structured logging, and real-time dashboards covering latency, throughput, error rates, and queue depth.
• Manage Redis infrastructure design: cache invalidation strategies, cluster topology, TTL policies, and data consistency patterns for session, entitlement, and reference data.
• Partner with Information Security and Compliance to embed security controls, audit logging, and regulatory requirements (OCC, FFIEC) into the platform from the architecture layer up.
• Ensure the right technologies, platforms, and solutions are leveraged to deliver zero latency applications that scale and support 24x7 uptime.
• Team Growth & Organization Building: Start lean: hire and lead a focused founding squad, including international talent, with the skills to stand up the platform and establish durable engineering practices.
• Build the hiring pipeline, leveling framework, and organizational structure to scale from 1 team to multiple pods covering platform, integrations, QA, and DevOps as product scope expands.
• Create engineering career paths, onboarding runbooks, and a team culture that attracts and retains senior talent in a competitive fintech market.
• Partner with the Head of Software Engineering on cross-platform standards, shared tooling, and enterprise engineering governance.
• Product & Strategy Partnership: Serve as the Head of Commercial Digital Product's primary technology partner, co-authoring the Commercial platform roadmap, weighing in on build-vs-buy decisions, and ensuring product commitments are grounded in engineering reality.
• Represent the Commercial platform in architecture reviews, executive technology forums, and cross-functional planning cycles.
• Lead vendor evaluation for platform components where third-party solutions may complement or extend the OutSystems-based core.

Benefits

• Medical, Dental, Vision, and Life Insurance
• Paid Sick Leave, 3 weeks’ Vacation, and Holidays (about 11 a year)
• HSA or FSA account and other voluntary benefits
• 401(k) Retirement Saving Plan with Employer Match Program and 529 Savings Plan
• Employee Mortgage Loan Program and free access to an Axos Bank Account with Self-Directed Trading

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Executive
• Education Level: No Education Listed
• Number of Employees: 501-1,000 employees