Join a Challenger
At EQ, we're remaking banking so every Canadian gets ahead, every day. Serving nearly 4 million Canadians from coast to coast, we offer a wide variety of financial services from banking and lending, to trust and credit union solutions.
We've been at this since 1970, challenging the conventions of traditional banking with smarter, faster, and more connected financial experiences.
What's kept us moving? The people behind it all: challengers who ask better questions, push back on old assumptions, and look for a better way forward.
If you're driven to help reshape how banking works for Canadians and the businesses that power our economy, this could be your next big opportunity.
We can’t wait to get to know you!
The Work
The Senior Director provides strategic leadership to accelerate technology integration and platform modernization by enabling teams with clear guardrails, reusable patterns, and automated governance. Rather than acting solely as a centralized control point, this role operates as an enterprise-wide architecture ‘force multiplier’—empowering domain and platform teams to deliver safely at speed while converging on a cohesive target-state. This role serves as the architecture integration leader for M&A, translating deal intent into executable transition states, sequencing, and platform convergence outcomes.
A critical focus is the integration of capabilities into the Bank’s core and digital ecosystem, establishing repeatable integration playbooks, canonical interfaces, and transition states that reduce risk while increasing time-to-value and synergy. The Senior Director drives measurable outcomes—faster delivery cycles, reduced complexity, TCO and improved resiliency—so the Bank can operate with challenger-bank agility in a regulated environment.
Key Responsibilities:
- Build and maintain an enterprise capability model and value-stream maps to anchor integration decisions—mapping capabilities to applications, data domains, and owners; identifying overlaps/gaps; and using this model to prioritize platform convergence, sequencing, and investment decisions.
- Develop transition states and sequencing plans to guide system consolidation, modernization, and decommissioning throughout the integration period.
- Establish architectural guardrails, standards, non‑functional requirements (NFRs), and design principles that govern cross‑functional decision‑making.
- Operationalize “architecture as code” by embedding standards and NFRs into pipelines, reference implementations, reusable templates, and automated checks (e.g., security, resilience, data controls), enabling self-service delivery at scale with consistent outcomes.
- Lead architecture reviews and manage the architectural risk register to ensure stability and compliance during major migration events.
- Provide architectural oversight for Day‑1, Day‑100, and major cutover activities, ensuring resilience, performance, and security requirements are met.
- Drive platform rationalization decisions, identifying redundant systems and recommending pathways to reduce complexity and operational cost.
- Collaborate with Technology, Retail Banking, Data Strategy, Cybersecurity, Operations, Infrastructure, and PMO teams to align design choices.
- Present architectural trade‑offs to senior executives with clear business, cost, risk, and timeline implications.
- Ensure all architecture activities support synergy goals, operational readiness, and long‑term scalability.
Driving Transformation and Integration
- Lead enterprise‑wide architecture integration for core banking, digital channels, payments, risk systems, and supporting platforms.
- Govern architecture for system cutovers, cloud migrations, and infrastructure consolidation.
- Guide the creation of architectural artifacts, transition maps, and decision records that drive clarity across teams.
- Lead the integration architecture across customer journeys, data domains, security/IAM, and integration patterns—defining canonical API/event contracts, transition states, and parallel-run / cut
Core Mandates for Success
- Partner closely with senior leaders across Technology, Data, Infrastructure, Cybersecurity, Retail Banking, and PMO.
- Provide leadership to solution architects, technical leads, and integration consultants throughout the program
- Mentor and grow a high-performing architecture by coaching on pragmatic frameworks, “just-enough” governance, and modern tooling (reference architectures, templates, decision records), raising overall architecture maturity and delivery throughput.
- Lead the integration operating model for architecture across internal teams, integration partners, and vendors—driving decision velocity, dependency clarity, and shared delivery standards during M&A execution.
Let's Talk About You!
- Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Architecture, or a related discipline.
- 10+ years of banking experience and 5–10 years in enterprise architecture, gained within financial services or consulting environments.
- Demonstrated ability to prototype and operationalize architecture decisions—using spike solutions, reference implementations, and experimentation to quickly test assumptions, quantify trade-offs, and inform executive decisions in fast-moving integration programs.
- Proven experience leading M&A integration architecture (pre-close planning through Day‑1/Day‑100 and beyond), including platform convergence, data/domain integration, cutover strategy, and decommissioning—ideally in regulated financial services and/or consulting-led environments.
- Expertise across architecture domains such as cloud, data analytics, APIs/integration, security, infrastructure, digital channels, and core banking platforms.
- Strong understanding of NFRs including reliability, performance, scalability, disaster recovery, and security.
- Ability to design and govern complex multi‑platform ecosystems.
- Strong leadership presence with the ability to simplify complexity and influence senior decision‑makers.
- Demonstrated ability to lead, mentor, and develop architects—building shared standards, improving architectural decision quality, and scaling consistent practices across a federated organization.
- Excellent communication skills and the ability to facilitate cross‑functional alignment.
- Strategic mindset paired with operational awareness.
- Architecture certifications such as TOGAF, SAFe Architect, or cloud architecture certifications are an asset.
What we offer [For full-time permanent roles]
💰 Competitive discretionary bonus
✨ Market leading RRSP match program
🩺 Medical, dental, vision, life, and disability benefits
📝 Employee Share Purchase Plan
👶🏽 Maternity/Parental top-up while you care for your little one
🏝 Generous vacation policy and personal days
🖥 Virtual events to connect with your fellow colleagues
🎓 Professional development and comprehensive Career Development program
💛 A fulfilling opportunity to join one of the top FinTechs and help create a new kind of banking experience
The incumbent will be working hybrid and in office time will be spent working from EQ Bank’s additional office space located at 2200-25 Ontario Street, Toronto, ON.
Equity, Diversity & Inclusion
EQ is committed to building an inclusive, accessible environment where every employee feels valued, respected, and supported. We believe our organization is stronger — and our people thrive — when we honour and celebrate diverse experiences, identities, and perspectives. We’re equally committed to supporting your growth, both professionally and personally.
We provide a barrier‑free recruitment process and work environment. If you require accommodations at any stage, we will work with you to ensure you can bring your best self to the process and beyond.
As part of our recruitment process, EQ uses AI to help screen, assess, and/or select applicants for this position. All AI-enabled outputs are reviewed and validated by our talent team. All candidates considered for hire must successfully complete a criminal background check and credit check. While we appreciate every application, an EQ recruiter will contact only those whose skills and experience most closely match the requirements of the role.
EQB Inc. (TSX: EQB) is the parent company of Equitable Bank, the country's seventh-largest Schedule I bank by assets, which operates EQ Bank, Canada's Challenger Bank™. EQB Inc. serves nearly 4 million Canadians and manages approximately $150 billion in combined assets under management and administration.
To learn more, visit eqb.investorroom.com and eqbank.ca.
