Senior Director, Smart Infrastructure Platforms

RBC • Toronto, ON

3d • Onsite

About The Position

Royal Bank of Canada is building the foundational infrastructure automation and orchestration platforms that power enterprise-wide cloud adoption. As Senior Director, Smart Infrastructure, you'll lead the strategy, engineering, and lifecycle operations of our infrastructure-as-code frameworks and policy enforcement systems. You'll reduce provisioning friction and technical debt by establishing enterprise standards, golden paths, and reusable automation capabilities that accelerate developer productivity. This role combines strategic vision with hands-on technical leadership, shaping how thousands of engineers consume infrastructure securely, compliantly, and cost-efficiently while managing complex multi-domain environments at scale.

Requirements

• 10-12+ years leading software engineering teams in regulated enterprise environments
• 5+ years in infrastructure automation and platform engineering, managing senior technical leaders across multi-product portfolios.
• Proven delivery of enterprise-scale infrastructure automation platforms, infrastructure-as-code frameworks, and orchestration systems that handle complex, multi-domain infrastructure provisioning at scale.
• Deep expertise with infrastructure-as-code tools and patterns; demonstrated ability to design modular, reusable, and production-hardened infrastructure-as-code solutions.
• Strong grasp of policy-as-code frameworks; experience embedding compliance, security, and financial guardrails into infrastructure automation workflows.
• Demonstrated success designing and operating orchestration layers that reliably translate infrastructure requests into executable automation; experience with API design and event-driven architectures.
• Demonstrated success implementing DevSecOps practices for infrastructure code at scale; strong grasp of controls, governance, and compliance requirements.
• SRE mindset with focus on operational excellence; experience defining SLOs/error budgets, establishing observability standards, managing incident response, and ensuring disaster recovery readiness.
• Financial and vendor management experience; ability to drive FinOps and cost optimization through infrastructure automation, manage budgets, and engage with vendors at executive level.

Nice To Haves

• Experience in regulated financial services environments; familiarity with compliance frameworks and control objectives in highly regulated industries.
• Certifications in infrastructure automation, cloud architecture, or policy-as-code frameworks.
• Track record of establishing and scaling communities of practice; demonstrated success raising engineering standards across multiple platforms and domains.
• Experience leading organizational change initiatives; proven ability to migrate teams from manual to automated patterns with minimal disruption.

Responsibilities

• Own infrastructure automation and infrastructure-as-code strategy for the hybrid infrastructure landscape; publish convergence roadmaps and establish reference architectures, module standards, and reusable automation patterns that drive enterprise adoption.
• Ratify and enforce infrastructure-as-code standards across the organization; set adoption timelines and drive enterprise consumption through clear communication, enablement programs, and communities of practice that raise automation standards.
• Govern infrastructure service readiness portfolio-wide; define and enforce standards for new services, manage lifecycle transitions from manual to automated processes, and coordinate onboarding to self-serve provisioning.
• Lead vendor strategy and partnerships around infrastructure automation tools and frameworks; negotiate feature roadmaps and licensing aligned to enterprise guardrails and infrastructure automation objectives.
• Direct enterprise planning across infrastructure automation teams; manage capacity and demand, establish release calendars for platform changes and policy rollouts, and ensure alignment and DevSecOps implementation at scale.
• Implement policy-as-code enforcement across infrastructure provisioning workflows; define baseline policies, compliance rules, cost guardrails, and access controls that embed security and governance at point-of-use.
• Drive cost optimization outcomes through infrastructure automation; implement tagging enforcement, cost visibility features, resource right-sizing rules, and spend limits within provisioning workflows; track cost avoidance with evidence.
• Lead 4-5 direct reports and ~25 indirect reports; establish an engineering collaboration culture rooted in data-driven decision making, security-by-default, and automation-first principles with blameless learning.

Benefits

• bonuses
• flexible benefits
• competitive compensation
• commissions
• stock where applicable
• Leaders who support your development through coaching and managing opportunities.
• Ability to make a difference and lasting impact.
• Work in a dynamic, collaborative, progressive, and high-performing team.
• A world-class training program in financial services.
• Opportunities to do challenging work.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed