Head of Engineering - SVP

Axos Bank • San Diego, CA

2d • $240,000 - $325,000 • Onsite

About The Position

The SVP, Head of Engineering is the senior engineering leader for Axos's Consumer, Securities & Wealth, AUC, and Philippines-based development organizations: four engineering groups totaling 400+ engineers, spanning software development, quality assurance, and business analysis across customer-facing web and mobile applications as well as back-office applications. This is a hands-on technical leadership role as much as a strategic one. This leader sets the multi-year development strategy and application architecture direction for these organizations, and is just as comfortable stepping personally into a struggling delivery to diagnose the problem and get it back on track. They own the operating model that makes delivery predictable, partner with the Centers of Excellence to bring AI-driven delivery (AIDLC) into day-to-day work, and hold the quality bar for every customer-facing experience these teams ship.

Axos Bank is a federally chartered, digital-first bank with over $28B in assets and no physical branches. Every customer interaction across our Consumer and Securities segments happens through software these teams build and own. We move with the urgency of a fintech and the stability of a regulated institution, and we're at a pivotal moment of scale: investing heavily in AI-driven delivery and seeking the engineering leader who will set the strategy and define how these teams deliver in Axos's next chapter.

Why Join Axos:
Axos is a rare environment: the scale of a major bank, the velocity of a fintech, and direct executive authority over both the strategy and the delivery of a 400+ engineer organization. You'll join as Axos's AIDLC moves from pilot to competitive advantage, and you'll be the leader who sets the direction and makes it real across Consumer, Securities & Wealth, AUC, and Philippines-based delivery. If you're motivated by setting strategy, staying technical, and building something consequential you can measure in outcomes, this is an exceptional opportunity.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in related field or higher.
• 10+ years of engineering leadership experience, including direct leadership of development, QA, and/or business analysis organizations of 300+ people.
• Deep, hands-on technical background, including current fluency in modern application architecture and technology such as API-first design, microservices, Redis, and CI/CD: someone who has personally written production code or led technical implementation, and can credibly evaluate and challenge technical decisions rather than only manage the people who make them.
• Deep working knowledge of how modern financial infrastructure operates, including banking and securities cores, fiat and securities settlement, and crypto and blockchain systems, along with a genuine willingness to rapidly learn as this technology continues to evolve.
• Direct, personal experience leading major project delivery rescue: has stepped into a failing initiative themselves and turned it around, not only delegated the turnaround to others.
• Track record of setting multi-year technology or engineering strategy for a large development organization, including build-versus-buy and platform investment decisions.
• Demonstrated track record of building or transforming delivery operating models at scale, with measurable improvements in velocity, predictability, or quality attributable to organizational and process changes you led.
• Hands-on experience with AI tooling in the AIDLC, having moved beyond AI-assisted development to deploying autonomous or semi-autonomous agents in testing, code review, or requirements workflows.
• Deep expertise building and operating customer-facing digital products where performance, latency, and experience quality are primary engineering concerns.
• Experience in a regulated industry with direct accountability for delivery practices that meet compliance and audit requirements.

Nice To Haves

• OutSystems: practical experience building enterprise-grade applications on OutSystems, including architecture patterns, performance tuning, integration design, and ODC vs. O11 tradeoffs.
• Background in financial services, fintech, digital banking, payments, or wealth management technology.
• Experience managing business analysis as an organizational function, with an understanding of how BA quality upstream affects delivery quality downstream.
• Familiarity with AIDLC frameworks and autonomous pipeline tooling (e.g., agent-based test generation, LLM-in-the-loop PR review, autonomous deployment validation).
• Experience managing delivery across co-dependent, multi-platform environments where release sequencing and dependency management are first-class engineering concerns.

Responsibilities

• Own the multi-year engineering and technology strategy for the Consumer, Securities & Wealth, AUC, and Philippines-based development organizations, translating business priorities into technical roadmaps.
• Own application architecture and engineering standards across your four engineering groups, replacing legacy technical debt with modern, maintainable patterns such as API-first design and service-oriented design.
• Set the technology and tooling direction for your organization, ensuring teams build on modern, well-supported platforms that scale, run reliably at low latency, and support 24x7 uptime.
• Keep your organization on the cutting edge of relevant technology, evaluating and adopting new tools, frameworks, and architectural patterns ahead of the industry curve rather than after they become standard.
• Make build-versus-buy and platform investment decisions for your organization, weighing speed, cost, and long-term technical health.
• Partner with peer technology verticals to implement the platform and tooling infrastructure AIDLC requires at scale in a regulated banking environment.
• Maintain a 12 to 24 month delivery capacity outlook for your organization that informs product roadmap feasibility and planning.
• Lead, develop, and hold accountable the engineering leaders of the Consumer, Securities & Wealth, AUC, and Philippines-based development organizations.
• Own delivery predictability as an organizational capability, improving the cadences, rituals, and accountability structures that make on-time, on-scope delivery the norm across these four groups.
• Define and operate cross-team dependency management: surface coupling risks across co-dependent platforms within your organization and resolve conflicts before they become delivery failures.
• Build and maintain engineering culture, career frameworks, and talent standards across development, QA, and BA disciplines, in partnership with HR and the Centers of Excellence.
• When a critical delivery is off track, personally step in: assess the technical blockers, work directly with the engineers and leads involved, and make the technical and organizational calls needed to get it back on schedule. This is a roll-up-your-sleeves role, not a delegate-and-monitor one.
• Bring Axos's AIDLC roadmap to life within your four engineering groups, moving beyond AI-assisted coding to autonomous agents that participate in building, testing, reviewing, and shipping software.
• Measure the impact of AIDLC tooling in delivery terms, such as cycle time, defect escape rate, engineer throughput, and time-to-production.
• Surface and resolve gaps between enterprise AI tooling standards and what your teams need in live delivery.
• Enable Model Context Protocol (MCP) interfaces across your platforms, for internal agentic tooling and for external-facing integrations, as Axos extends AI access to its systems.
• Set and enforce the engineering quality bar across customer-facing web and mobile platforms as well as back-office applications for the Consumer, Securities & Wealth, AUC, and Philippines-based organizations.
• Own performance standards for these platforms. Low-latency response times, reliability SLAs, accessibility compliance, and UX consistency are delivery criteria, not aspirational targets.
• Build QA and performance testing into the delivery pipeline as a continuous, automated function, not a gate at the end. Champion shift-left testing and AI-augmented quality practices across all four groups.
• Establish and track customer-facing performance benchmarks, using data to drive engineering investment decisions and communicate quality posture to Jonathan and other stakeholders.
• Partner with shared-capability leaders in architecture, DevOps, security, QE tooling, and AIDLC infrastructure to ensure those capabilities are roadmapped to support your teams' delivery.
• Collaborate with product leadership to create a planning model where engineering strategy, constraints, and AI-enabled delivery capacity are upstream inputs to roadmap decisions.
• Represent your engineering organization in senior leadership conversations, translating strategy, delivery health, technical risk, and capability investment needs into business terms that feed directly into Jonathan's regular board-level reporting.
• Partner with Risk, Compliance, and the CISO to ensure AIDLC and AI-driven delivery practices in your organization meet regulatory standards appropriate for a federally chartered bank.

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