Vice President, Canadian Banking Engineering Resiliency

Scotiabank•Toronto, ON

3d•Onsite

About The Position

The Vice President, Canadian Banking Engineering Resiliency (The VP), is a pivotal leadership role responsible for the seamless operation, continuous improvement, and high availability of IT solutions across Canadian Banking and ScotiaTech. This role will establish standards and benchmarks starting with CBE and will play a critical role in driving these standards across all technology domains delivering against our strategic pillar ‘Fortify the Bank.’ The VP oversees the stability, resiliency, and release management of Canadian Banking Engineering teams and applications, ensuring they support the Bank's mission to provide exceptional service to its clients. This position demands a visionary leader who can meet emerging challenges and seize opportunities, we need robust systems, clear standards, and strong leadership to drive improvements and set high benchmarks.

Requirements

University degree in Computer Engineering / Applied Science / Technology.
10+ years of Software Engineering experience.
10+ years of progressively increasing leadership experience in Information Technology management data, platform, and system(s) management.
10+ years of Global application development and support.
5+ years of Solutions Architecture.
2+ years of System Reliability Engineering.
Excellent technical communication skills, able to grasp business and technical concepts and tailor presentations to different audiences. (Senior Executives, Business Sponsors, Architects, Developers).

Responsibilities

Define and execute the stability strategy across critical platforms and applications.
Own uptime and availability targets (e.g., 99.99% uptime for client-facing apps).
Oversee incident management, root cause analysis (RCA), and postmortems.
Partner with engineering teams to embed Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) practices (SLOs, SLIs, error budgets).
Reduce technical debt and systemic issues that contribute to outages.
Own enterprise-wide monitoring and observability frameworks.
Provide CIO/CTO/business leaders with reliability dashboards (MTTD, MTTR, uptime, systemic risk).
Drive proactive detection of instabilities before clients are impacted.
Lead teams of SREs, reliability engineers, and DR/BCP specialists.
Engage with regulators, auditors, and the board on resilience posture.
Influence enterprise architecture for resilient cloud/microservices design.
Drive continuous improvement programs to reduce outages year over year.
Lead resilience strategy: disaster recovery (DR), business continuity planning (BCP), cyber-resilience.
Ensure compliance with regulatory expectations (e.g., OSFI, OCC/FFIEC, PRA).
Drive resiliency testing: chaos engineering, failover simulations, backup/recovery drills.
Identify and address single points of failure.
Chair or co-chair stability/resilience councils.
Build a culture of 'stability first' across design, coding, testing, deployment.
Balance speed of innovation with stability.
Champion reliability as a shared responsibility across engineering, operations, and business.
Collaborate and partner with the VP of Engineering or Delivery to integrate reliability into product roadmaps.
Collaborate with VP of Architecture: Influence design for resilience patterns.
Coordinate with VP of Security: Align cyber-resilience with operational resilience.
Work with VP of Cloud/Infrastructure: Align observability, monitoring, and reliability tooling.
Establish a predictive reliability program using AI/ML to forecast outages before they happen.
Embed resilience as a competitive differentiator: market reliability as part of client experience.
Create a cross-bank 'resilience index' and benchmark against peers.
Introduce automated resilience testing pipelines (chaos-as-code).
Champion business–tech alignment: measure not just uptime, but impact on revenue, NPS, and client trust.
Publish whitepapers or share best practices to influence the broader industry.
Directs day-to-day activities in a manner consistent with the Bank’s risk culture and the relevant risk appetite statement and limits.
Communicates the Bank’s risk culture and risk appetite statement throughout their teams.
Creates an environment in which his/her team pursues effective and efficient operations of their respective areas, while ensuring the adequacy, adherence to and effectiveness of day-to-day business controls to meet obligations with respect to operational risk, regulatory compliance risk, AML/ATF risk and conduct risk, including but not limited to responsibilities under the Operational Risk Management Framework, Regulatory Compliance Risk Management Framework, AML/ATF Global Handbook and the Guidelines for Business Conduct.
Builds a high-performance environment and implements a people strategy that attracts, retains, develops, and motivates the team by fostering an inclusive work environment and using a coaching mindset and behaviors, communicating vison/values/business strategy, and managing succession and development planning for the team.