Senior Director, Engineering - Corporates, Financial Institutions & Sovereigns

Fitch Group•Toronto, ON

31d•CA$250,000 - CA$325,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Fitch Ratings is seeking a builder, challenger, and boundary-pusher to lead the engineering organization responsible for all applications and services powering their Corporates, Financial Institutions, and Sovereigns lines of business. This role is for someone who questions the status quo, reimagines it, and has the courage and capability to drive change. As Senior Director, you will have executive ownership of four engineering teams comprising a couple of dozen engineers. You'll lead a talented, multidisciplinary group tackling consequential technology challenges in global financial intelligence, maintaining and evolving current systems while building the next generation of platforms with creative freedom and organizational backing. This role requires someone who moves fast, experiments boldly, and doesn't wait for permission to try something new. Experience in machine learning or AI systems, not just using them but building them, is highly valued. The role goes beyond a single discipline, focusing on leading a culture of relentless innovation across all aspects of software development and delivery.

Requirements

18+ years of hands-on software engineering experience.
Substantial time in senior technical leadership roles overseeing multiple teams and disciplines.
Proven multi-team leadership, including leading team leads and engineers across full-stack disciplines.
Track record of building high-performing, inventive engineering cultures at meaningful scale.
Deep technical credibility and hands-on instinct, with a strong command of modern software architecture, cloud-native platforms, and production-grade application delivery.
Full-stack engineering expertise with modern enterprise technology stacks, including React, Java, and/or Python in production environments.
Deployment across AWS and/or Azure.
A bias for experimentation and innovation, with a demonstrable history of pushing technical boundaries and driving teams toward meaningfully better approaches.
Modernization and greenfield experience, including evolving existing platforms and designing/delivering new systems.
Comfort making bold architectural decisions in both constrained legacy and open greenfield environments.
People leadership and talent development skills, including attracting, growing, and retaining exceptional engineers and leaders.
Cross-functional stakeholder management skills, including partnering effectively across analytical, operational, and business-facing teams, as well as peer technical organizations.
Skilled at managing competing priorities and driving alignment across complex interdependency landscapes.
Executive communication skills, including translating bold technical vision for non-technical audiences, building trust through delivery, and making complex ideas land clearly at every level.
Bachelor's, Master's, or PhD in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Machine Learning, or a related technical field, or equivalent expertise demonstrated through impact.

Nice To Haves

An ML or AI engineering background, including meaningful time building machine learning systems, training models, designing intelligent pipelines, or architecting AI-native applications.
Deep cloud-native expertise, including hands-on mastery of AWS and/or Azure, Docker, Kubernetes/EKS, microservices architecture, and sophisticated CI/CD and deployment pipelines for large-scale application delivery.
Generative AI and intelligent systems experience, including hands-on experience with LLMs, RAG architectures, agentic workflows, or production ML systems.
The ability to move between engineering credibility and strategic vision.
AI-native delivery leadership, including direct experience implementing AI-augmented development lifecycles, intelligent testing pipelines, or AI-assisted tooling.
Transformation and platform modernization leadership, including a history of successfully reimagining complex, production-critical platforms while maintaining delivery continuity.
A maverick streak with enterprise judgment – the ability to challenge conventions and move with urgency within a complex organization.
Financial services domain knowledge, including familiarity with analytical workflows, credit ratings processes, or how technology creates leverage in financial decision-making.
Technical thought leadership, such as contributing to open source, speaking at industry events, publishing engineering content, or establishing technical direction that influences beyond the immediate team.

Responsibilities

Challenge the conventional and set a bolder technical vision.
Own the strategic direction, execution, and engineering culture of four high-performing full-stack engineering teams.
Interrogate existing systems, ask critical questions about their design, and lead teams toward smarter, faster, and more powerful solutions.
Set a technical vision that reimagines what's possible for the platforms powering Fitch's critical analytical work.
Build, develop, and inspire exceptional people, including team leads and engineers across various technical backgrounds and experience levels.
Foster a culture of intellectual curiosity, experimentation, and safe risk-taking.
Attract and retain hungry, inventive engineers.
Oversee the full lifecycle of applications and services central to Fitch's analytical workflows.
Balance maintaining production-grade systems with rebuilding what no longer serves the business well.
Identify and pursue opportunities to design and build net-new applications and platforms.
Embrace greenfield development with the rigor of world-class software delivery.
Define how intelligent systems become structural, load-bearing parts of owned platforms, including LLM-powered workflows, ML models, agentic automation, and AI-augmented developer tooling.
Evaluate, architect, and champion AI capabilities with technical conviction.
Act as a strategic partner to a diverse set of stakeholders, including senior leadership, analytical teams, operations, and business relationship management.
Navigate a rich ecosystem of technical interdependencies and partner with peer engineering teams.
Build organizational credibility through consistent delivery, clear technical vision, and bringing bold ideas to life.

Benefits

A genuine mandate to innovate with real organizational backing.
Executive visibility and strategic influence.
Direct access to senior leadership.
The platform to shape engineering direction across consequential lines of business.
The opportunity to leave a lasting mark on how global financial intelligence is delivered.
Lead a capable, experienced engineering organization while simultaneously running a bold innovation agenda.
A role at the intersection of operational accountability and creative freedom.
An environment where ML and AI expertise shapes product direction, platform design, and organizational thinking.
Access to the latest AI tools, frameworks, platforms.
Training and conference budgets.
Career acceleration at scale with high visibility to senior leaders.
A clear path to principal and executive roles.
The opportunity to define what AI-driven financial technology looks like in practice.
A culture that rewards curiosity, where bold ideas are welcomed, experimentation is celebrated, and the best thinking wins.