Director of Engineering Azure Platforms

At Manulife, we are committed to improving the lives of our customers through innovative financial solutions and services. We foster a collaborative, inclusive, and high-performing environment where employees are empowered to grow, contribute, and make an impact.

The Director of Engineering Azure Platforms leads Manulife’s cloud modernization and platform engineering strategy, overseeing the consolidation, migration, and operational excellence of key Azure services. This role drives major initiatives including FinOps driven consolidation, application modernization, certificate lifecycle management, workload migrations, and tech currency while ensuring the reliability, security, and scalability of our cloud environments.

Position Responsibilities:

• Lead large-scale Azure modernization and cloud transformation initiatives, including platform consolidation, FinOps optimization, Terraform compliance enhancements, and domain realignment across enterprise cloud environments. 
• Direct the migration of legacy applications and platforms to modern cloud-native solutions, ensuring reliability, scalability, security, and operational readiness. 
• Oversee the maintenance and continuous improvement of Azure services, including Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Azure API Management (APIM), and Event Hub, with a focus on capacity management, patching, resiliency, and performance. 
• Lead enterprise certificate lifecycle management, including certificate rotations, renewals, and integration with automated deployment pipelines. 
• Ensure operational stability through effective monitoring, alerting, incident management, and reliability engineering practices. 
• Partner with Architecture, Cybersecurity, Risk, and Compliance teams to ensure alignment with OSFI guidelines, cloud governance standards, and identity and access management policies. 
• Drive Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform and Ansible), GitOps, and CI/CD automation practices to improve consistency, efficiency, and deployment quality. 
• Provide leadership across complex, multi-team engineering programs, managing scope, risks, dependencies, and delivery outcomes. 
• Collaborate with Product, Security, Infrastructure, and Application Development teams to deliver integrated cloud solutions that support business objectives. 
• Evaluate emerging Azure technologies and engineering practices to enhance platform reliability, developer experience, and operational effectiveness. 
• Foster a culture of continuous improvement, innovation, automation, operational excellence, and service reliability. 

Required Qualifications:

• 5+ years of people leadership and management experience within Information Technology. 
• Extensive experience leading cloud engineering teams with deep technical expertise in Azure platform services, including AKS, Event Hub, APIM, Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Azure Active Directory), Azure SQL, Key Vault, and Azure Networking. 
• Proven experience leading large-scale workload migrations, including legacy-to-cloud transformations, Azure solution delivery, and multi-application migration programs. 
• Strong expertise in container platform engineering, including AKS management, image lifecycle processes, scaling strategies, and Kubernetes governance. 
• Demonstrated experience implementing certificate lifecycle automation, certificate rotation strategies, and secure key and certificate management using Azure Key Vault. 
• Hands-on experience with Infrastructure-as-Code and DevOps practices using tools such as Terraform, Ansible, GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps, Jenkins, Helm, and GitOps solutions. 
• Proven ability to lead complex engineering initiatives involving platform upgrades, cloud consolidations, and enterprise modernization programs.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience managing strategic vendor relationships, including remote delivery partners and large-scale multi-team integration initiatives. 
• Strong communication, stakeholder management, and executive presentation skills, with the ability to translate complex technical concepts into clear business outcomes. 
• Demonstrated success in building, developing, and mentoring high-performing engineering teams while fostering an inclusive and collaborative culture.

When you join our team: 

• We’ll empower you to learn and grow the career you want.  
• We’ll recognize and support you in a flexible environment where well-being and inclusion are more than just words.  
• As part of our distributed team, we’ll support you in shaping the future you want to see. 

The role being advertised is an existing vacancy.

About Manulife and John Hancock

Manulife Financial Corporation is a leading international financial services provider, helping people make their decisions easier and lives better. To learn more about us, visit https://www.manulife.com/en/about/our-story.html.

Manulife is an Equal Opportunity Employer

At Manulife/John Hancock, we embrace our diversity. We strive to attract, develop and retain a workforce that is as diverse as the customers we serve and to foster an inclusive work environment that embraces the strength of cultures and individuals. We are committed to fair recruitment, retention, advancement and compensation, and we administer all of our practices and programs without discrimination on the basis of race, ancestry, place of origin, colour, ethnic origin, citizenship, religion or religious beliefs, creed, sex (including pregnancy and pregnancy-related conditions), sexual orientation, genetic characteristics, veteran status, gender identity, gender expression, age, marital status, family status, disability, or any other ground protected by applicable law.

It is our priority to remove barriers to provide equal access to employment. A Human Resources representative will work with applicants who request a reasonable accommodation during the application process. All information shared during the accommodation request process will be stored and used in a manner that is consistent with applicable laws and Manulife/John Hancock policies. To request a reasonable accommodation in the application process, contact hr@manulife.com.

Referenced Salary Location

Waterloo, OntarioHybrid

Salary range is expected to be between

$113,260.00 CAD - $210,340.00 CAD

Employees also have the opportunity to participate in incentive programs and earn incentive compensation tied to business and individual performance. The actual salary will vary depending on local market conditions, geography and relevant job-related factors such as knowledge, skills, qualifications, experience, and education/training. If you are applying for this role outside of the primary location, please contact hr@manulife.com for the salary range for your location.

Manulife offers eligible employees a wide array of customizable benefits, including health, dental, mental health, vision, short- and long-term disability, life and AD&D insurance coverage, adoption/surrogacy and wellness benefits, and employee/family assistance plans. We also offer eligible employees various retirement savings plans (including pension and a global share ownership plan with employer matching contributions) and financial education and counseling resources. Our generous paid time off program in Canada includes holidays, vacation, personal, and sick days, and we offer the full range of statutory leaves of absence. If you are applying for this role in the U.S., please contact hr@manulife.com for more information about U.S.-specific paid time off provisions.

We use data and analytics technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI), and automated processing tools, to analyze and process the information you provide to us or third parties in the application process. For more information, please refer to our personal information collection statement.