Head of Engineering - SVP

Axos Bank • San Diego, CA

15h • 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. This role reports onsite to Axos Bank's HQ in San Diego, CA. Remote work is not available.

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