VP of Systems Engineering - USA

Bankjoy

2d•Remote

About The Position

Bankjoy is a Y Combinator and Bessemer Venture Partner backed FinTech startup focused on enabling community banks and credit unions to become tech-driven and digital first. We provide modern digital banking products including mobile banking, online banking, online account opening, loan origination, and conversational AI. Our mission is to revolutionize banking tech infrastructure by leading digital transformation at financial institutions. We are seeking a VP of System Engineering to lead Release Management, QA, and DevOps, and to establish a quality engineering framework across the organization. This is a hands-on leadership role at a crucial growth stage, requiring deep expertise in quality engineering and platform reliability, experience building automation programs, and the ability to drive a cultural shift towards automation-first quality practices. The ideal candidate understands the demands of delivering reliable, compliant software to regulated financial institutions and can build systems that make quality transparent.

Requirements

10+ years of engineering experience
At least 4 years in engineering leadership, managing QA, DevOps, or platform reliability teams
Deep background in quality engineering; personally built or rebuilt automation frameworks
Proven experience migrating automation frameworks in a multi-platform environment (web and native mobile, iOS and Android)
Demonstrated success driving a cultural shift from manual-heavy to automation-first QA in a fintech, banking, or similarly regulated environment
Experience implementing release gate processes and enforcing go/no-go decisions under schedule pressure
Hands-on experience with modern automation tooling: Playwright, Cypress, Appium, Maestro, or equivalent
Familiarity with Angular, Swift, and Kotlin environments is a strong advantage
Strong DevOps and platform reliability background: CI/CD pipelines, cloud infrastructure (AWS preferred), monitoring, and observability
Experience driving AI coding and testing tool adoption across engineering teams
Strong technical depth, able to engage directly in solution design, architecture discussions, production incident response, and root-cause analysis
Strong cross-functional credibility; worked closely with technical support, release management, and product
Excellent communication and organizational influence

Nice To Haves

Experience in fintech, core banking, or digital banking platforms
Familiarity with credit union or community bank client environments
Experience with SOC 2 Type II, PCI DSS, or similar regulatory compliance contexts
Background working with multi-platform products serving both financial institutions and end consumers
Experience managing QA teams through a transition from manual QA to quality engineering roles
Experience building or managing an SRE function from scratch

Responsibilities

Lead three core engineering functions: Release Management, QA, and DevOps, owning delivery quality, release discipline, and platform reliability.
Maintain a dotted-line relationship with manual QA engineers, setting quality standards and processes org-wide.
Provide hands-on technical leadership, engaging directly with the team on solution design, architecture, incident response, and troubleshooting.
Partner with the VP of Engineering on cross-cutting initiatives like AI coding adoption and architectural standards.
Participate in senior leadership alongside the COO, VP of Engineering, and product leadership.
Design and implement Bankjoy's engineering quality framework across all value streams, setting standards for testing and release readiness.
Own a modern multi-platform automation framework covering Angular, Swift, and Kotlin.
Define and enforce quality gates: explicit go/no-go release criteria for all value streams.
Develop and coach the QA organization towards an automation-first quality engineering model.
Establish test data management, environment parity standards, and CI/CD quality integration.
Build a quality dashboard for transparency on automation coverage, defect counts, and regression rates.
Partner with the Release Manager to implement a structured release gate process with go/no-go decisions.
Work closely with Technical Support to improve feedback loops between production issues and engineering prioritization.
Own post-release retrospectives to extract systemic lessons and drive process changes.
Partner with product leadership to enforce scope freeze discipline and ensure QA involvement in sprint planning.
Lead DevOps strategy, owning CI/CD pipelines, cloud infrastructure, monitoring, alerting, and platform reliability.
Drive platform observability for real-time visibility into system health and performance metrics.
Oversee Site Reliability Engineering practices.
Ensure infrastructure and deployment practices meet security, compliance, and uptime standards.
Champion AI-assisted coding and testing adoption across teams.
Embed AI productivity into engineering performance criteria.
Ensure AI tools are used in QA for test generation, maintenance, and regression coverage.

Benefits

Competitive compensation
Stock options at a well-funded startup
100% coverage of medical, dental, and vision premiums for individuals on our base plan, with significant contributions toward all other plan options (USA)
100% coverage of extended medical, dental, and vision premiums for you and your family under our single, comprehensive plan (Canada)
Retirement plan with 4% company matching
8 weeks paid parental leave for birthing parents, 4 weeks for non-birthing
3-5 weeks PTO depending on tenure
5 health days
15 holidays
End of year shutdown
Performance-based bonuses