This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, who manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a VP of Systems Engineering based in Canada.
This is a senior, hands-on engineering leadership role responsible for strengthening quality, release management, and platform reliability across a growing technology organization. You’ll lead QA, DevOps, and Release Management while establishing engineering standards that scale across multiple product teams. The role combines organizational leadership with meaningful technical involvement in architecture, automation, production reliability, and incident response. A major focus will be transitioning quality practices from manual-heavy processes toward a modern, automation-first quality engineering model. You’ll also help shape the adoption of AI-assisted development and testing across engineering. Working closely with product, technical support, and executive leadership, you’ll have a direct impact on how reliably and efficiently technology is delivered to regulated financial-services customers.
Accountabilities:
- Lead the QA, DevOps, and Release Management functions, establishing clear ownership for delivery quality, release discipline, and platform reliability.
- Maintain a dotted-line relationship with manual QA engineers embedded across product engineering teams, setting organization-wide quality standards and coordinating priorities with technical leads.
- Provide hands-on technical leadership across solution design, architecture decisions, production incidents, troubleshooting, and root-cause analysis.
- Partner with senior engineering and product leadership on cross-functional initiatives, architectural standards, release coordination, and AI-assisted engineering adoption.
- Design and implement an organization-wide engineering quality framework covering unit testing, integration testing, automated regression, and release readiness.
- Build and maintain a multi-platform automation strategy spanning web and native mobile environments.
- Establish explicit quality gates and go/no-go release criteria, including automation coverage, defect thresholds, and quality engineering sign-offs.
- Coach and develop the QA organization as it evolves from traditional manual testing toward an automation-first quality engineering model.
- Establish standards for test data management, environment parity, and CI/CD integration across engineering teams.
- Develop transparent quality dashboards covering automation coverage, defects, regression progress, and other indicators of release readiness.
- Implement structured release reviews and formal release decision processes in partnership with engineering, QA, product, and release management.
- Collaborate with technical support to connect production feedback with engineering priorities and drive systemic improvements rather than isolated fixes.
- Lead post-release retrospectives for client-impacting releases and ensure resulting improvements have clear owners and deadlines.
- Partner with product teams to reinforce scope discipline and ensure QA involvement throughout planning, grooming, and development cycles.
- Lead DevOps strategy covering CI/CD, cloud infrastructure, monitoring, alerting, observability, and platform reliability.
- Drive visibility into system health and operational performance through metrics such as deployment frequency, change failure rate, and mean time to recovery.
- Develop and strengthen Site Reliability Engineering practices as the organization scales.
- Ensure infrastructure, deployment, security, compliance, and uptime practices meet the expectations of regulated financial-services environments.
- Champion AI-assisted coding and testing, including AI-generated tests, automated test maintenance, and prompt-driven regression coverage.
- Help embed responsible AI adoption into engineering practices, productivity measurement, knowledge sharing, and quality standards.
Requirements
- 10+ years of engineering experience, including at least 4 years in engineering leadership across QA, DevOps, platform engineering, or reliability functions.
- Deep quality engineering expertise, including direct experience building or rebuilding automated testing frameworks.
- Proven experience migrating or modernizing automation frameworks across web and native mobile environments, including iOS and Android.
- Demonstrated success transforming manual-heavy QA organizations into automation-first quality engineering teams.
- Experience in fintech, banking, or another highly regulated technology environment is strongly preferred.
- Proven experience implementing formal release gates and making go/no-go decisions under delivery pressure.
- Hands-on knowledge of modern automation tools such as Playwright, Cypress, Appium, Maestro, or comparable technologies.
- Familiarity with Angular, Swift, and Kotlin environments is an advantage.
- Strong DevOps and platform reliability expertise, including CI/CD, cloud infrastructure, monitoring, and observability; AWS experience is preferred.
- Experience driving organization-wide adoption of AI-assisted coding and testing tools, with a focus on measurable cultural and productivity improvements.
- Strong technical depth and the ability to participate directly in architecture, solution design, incident response, troubleshooting, and root-cause analysis.
- Strong understanding of security, compliance, and reliability requirements for financial technology platforms.
- Excellent cross-functional collaboration skills and experience working with technical support, product, engineering, and release management teams.
- Strong communication and organizational influence, with the ability to establish and enforce quality standards across senior stakeholder groups.
- Experience with SOC 2 Type II, PCI DSS, or similar regulatory frameworks is an asset.
- Familiarity with credit unions, community banks, core banking, or digital banking platforms is an asset.
- Experience building or managing an SRE function from the ground up is an advantage.
Benefits
- Fully remote, remote-first work environment for candidates based in Canada.
- Competitive compensation package with performance-based bonus opportunities.
- Stock options in a well-funded, growth-oriented technology company.
- 100% coverage of extended medical, dental, and vision premiums for employees and their families under the Canadian plan.
- Retirement plan with 4% employer matching.
- 8 weeks of paid parental leave for birthing parents and 4 weeks for non-birthing parents.
- 3–5 weeks of paid time off depending on tenure.
- 5 paid health days.
- 15 paid holidays.
- End-of-year company shutdown.
- Fast-paced, collaborative environment with significant leadership influence.
- Opportunity to shape engineering quality, automation, DevOps, reliability, and AI adoption at organizational scale.
- Meaningful opportunity to influence technology used by regulated financial institutions and their customers.
How Jobgether works:
We use an AI-powered matching process to ensure your application is reviewed quickly, objectively, and fairly against the role's core requirements. Our system identifies the top-fitting candidates, and this shortlist is then shared directly with the hiring company. The final decision and next steps (interviews, assessments) are managed by their internal team.
We appreciate your interest and wish you the best!
Data Privacy Notice: By submitting your application, you acknowledge that Jobgether will process your personal data to evaluate your candidacy and share relevant information with the hiring employer. This processing is based on legitimate interest and pre-contractual measures under applicable data protection laws (including GDPR). You may exercise your rights (access, rectification, erasure, objection) at any time.
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