Questrade Financial Group (QFG), through its companies - Questrade, Questbank, Questrade Wealth Management, Community Trust Company, Zolo, and Flexiti, provides securities and foreign currency investment, professionally managed investment portfolios, mortgages, real estate services, financial services and more. We use cutting-edge technology to help Canadians become much more financially successful and secure.
At QFG, we combine human-centric collaboration with AI-driven innovation to redefine financial services. The ideal candidate will be a catalyst for change, using AI to transform and deliver unparalleled customer experiences and shaping a future where AI empowers our teams to do their best work.
Join our diverse, inclusive, and hybrid workplace to unleash your creativity and nurture your curiosity without limits. If you share this sense of infinite possibility, come shape your future at QFG.
What’s in it for you as an employee of QFG?
- Health & wellbeing resources and programs
- Paid vacation, personal, and sick days for work-life balance
- Competitive compensation and benefits packages
- Work-life balance in a hybrid environment with at least 3 days in office
- Career growth and development opportunities
- Opportunities to contribute to community causes
- Work with diverse team members in an inclusive and collaborative environment
This job posting is for an existing vacancy.
We’re looking for our next Director of Engineering, Banking. Could It Be You?
The Director of Engineering, Banking provides cross-functional management focused on the delivery of world-class engineering solutions in full-service digital banking services. This is a seasoned leader who enables the establishment of high-performing technical teams in the organization.
As one of the key executors of the technology strategy, this role oversees the engineering teams responsible for delivering technology products, particularly in the area of Digital & Core Banking. This leader will implement innovative approaches to ensure their teams are unblocked and performing well towards their goals, in collaboration with product and other teams to fulfill Questrade’s mission: help Canadians become more financially successful and secure.
As the Director of Engineering for a bank, you'll contribute to the technology strategy and execution that powers the bank's operations and customer experiences. You'll oversee the development and maintenance of the banking platforms that enable certain business outcomes, from core systems (e.g. Temenos, HPS, Thales, Equifax etc) to customer-facing mobile apps. This role requires a blend of technical expertise, strategic leadership, and a deep understanding of the financial services industry.
- Platform Leadership: Direct the architecture and development of critical banking platforms, including core banking systems, digital banking channels, data platforms, and APIs. Drive the strategic roadmap for platform modernization, including cloud adoption and the integration of new technologies like Generative AI.
- Team Management: Build, mentor, and lead high-performing engineering teams. Foster a culture of innovation, accountability, and continuous improvement.
- Strategic Execution: Translate business goals and regulatory requirements into a clear and executable engineering strategy. Ensure the end-to-end delivery of technical projects, from concept to deployment.
- Security & Compliance: Uphold the highest standards of security, resilience, and regulatory compliance across all technology platforms. Collaborate with cybersecurity, risk, and fraud teams to protect the bank's assets and customers.
- Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner with product, business, operations and other technology teams to align solutions with business needs and deliver a seamless experience for customers.
This role is for a visionary leader who can navigate the complexities of a regulated industry while driving technological innovation to create a competitive advantage.
Need more details? Keep reading…
Delivery Responsibilities
1. Platform Strategy and Architecture
This is the most critical area. The Director of Engineering is not just building software; they are building the technological foundation of the bank.
- Core Banking Platforms: This involves contributing to key strategic decisions about the bank's core system—the central nervous system that manages accounts, transactions, and customer data. This could mean leading the teams through a multi-year continuous improvement lifecycle on cloud-native platforms like Temenos or HPS. This requires a deep understanding of the pros and cons of these platforms, as well as the technical and operational risks associated with these changes.
- Digital Banking Platforms: This includes the public-facing applications (web and mobile apps) that customers interact with daily. The Director of Engineering is responsible for ensuring these platforms provide a seamless, secure, and intuitive user experience for everything from checking balances to applying for a loan. They must stay current with technologies that enable features like contactless payments, digital wallets, and biometric authentication.
- Data and Analytics Platforms: Retail banks generate massive amounts of data.The Director of Engineering must architect the systems that collect, store, and analyze this data to provide a 360-degree view of the customer. This includes implementing data warehouses, data lakes, and analytics tools that power personalized insights, fraud detection, and risk management.
- API and Integration Platforms: The rise of open banking means that banks must be able to securely and efficiently share data and services with third-party fintech partners. The Director of Engineering is responsible for building the API gateways and integration layers that enable these partnerships while maintaining strict security protocols.
2. Platform Modernization and Innovation
The Director of Engineering is a key driver of the bank's digital transformation.
- Cloud Adoption: A major part of the role is leading the move to the cloud (e.g., AWS, Google Cloud, Azure). This isn't just a technical task; it's a strategic shift that affects everything from scalability and security to cost management and time-to-market.
- Emerging Technology Integration: They must evaluate and champion the adoption of new technologies that can improve the bank's platforms. This includes Generative AI for creating more personalized customer experiences and Robotic Process Automation (RPA) for streamlining back-office operations like loan processing and compliance checks.
- Composable Banking: The trend is to move away from monolithic platforms and towards a "composable" architecture where different services (e.g., lending, payments, KYC) can be swapped in and out. The Director of Engineering must design and build the systems that make this modularity possible, increasing the bank's agility and ability to innovate.
3. Platform Security and Resilience
In a regulated industry like banking, platform security is non-negotiable.
- Risk and Compliance: They are ultimately responsible for ensuring all platforms and their components adhere to stringent regulatory requirements. This includes managing operational risk, credit risk, and financial crime prevention (e.g., Anti-Money Laundering).
- Cybersecurity: This involves working closely with cybersecurity teams to implement robust security measures, including encryption, threat detection, and incident response plans.They must ensure the bank's platforms are protected from cyber threats and data breaches.
- Operational Resilience: The Director of Engineering must ensure that the bank's platforms are highly available and can recover quickly from any disruptions. This involves building fault-tolerant systems, implementing disaster recovery plans, and conducting regular resilience testing.
By focusing on these core responsibilities, the Director of Engineering ensures that the technology organization is not just a support function but a strategic business partner, driving growth and creating a competitive advantage.
Engineering Responsibilities
- Be a forward-thinking technologist who is continuously researching new approaches to problems and discussing them with others in a productive manner, in a community of practice setting.
- Maintain a view and provide visibility into the engineering roadmaps and milestones to executive stakeholders, handling questions, concerns and making adjustments as needed.
- Provide leadership support to teams that are implementing, and testing customer-facing and internal web and mobile applications, with a focus on digital investing.
- Support teams in continuously improving their applications’ functionality, scalability, and maintainability, including the proper management of technical debt.
- Provide support and expertise for a complex and hybrid (cloud and on-premises) infrastructure environment; evaluation (with recommendations) to enable proper operability of applications on both infrastructure and software levels.
- Meet regularly and interact productively with a diverse team of business stakeholders, user interface and experience designers, architects, engineers as needed to elicit, define, analyze and document requirements and principles for new applications.
- Support technical leaders in defining technical requirements to facilitate development, testing, implementation, and ongoing support of applications within scoped teams.
- Lead the support efforts of the applications built-in production, addressing issues in a timely fashion, respecting agreed-upon service level objectives.
- Be an active voice in defining and implementing best practices, standards, and procedures including quality and delivery methodologies.
- Ensure compliance with the documented software processes and procedures throughout the life cycle of software products.
- Make sure that code written within scoped teams is reviewed and tested appropriately.
- Conducts research and proof of concepts, ensuring the value is documented and socialized.
- Assist teams with sharing knowledge and lessons learned with others in the organization.
- Apply significant knowledge of the technology industry trends to help Questrade to improve and build innovative products.
- Provide support and expertise for a multi-tier environment; evaluation (with recommendations) for any additional infrastructure or software required to support the scoped application.
Engineering Team Governance Responsibilities
- Lead design and engineering team leads to continually improve adoption of Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) best practices and methodologies
- Streamline and enhance the software development life-cycle (SDLC) to ensure the design and implementation planning, execution, and reporting is effective, efficient, standardized, coordinated, and integrated
- Govern the production of all required project artifacts produced by the team
- Manage multiple development teams across all locations and ensure alignment with departmental processes and standards
- Determine requirements for the team budget including all required resources (staff, hardware, tools, etc.)
- Measure the effectiveness of the engineering team capabilities with consideration of quality and timeliness of deliverables
- Govern the selection & configuration of engineering tools. Organize tool-training, usage, and deployment
- Align all efforts according to Questrade Strategy and Enterprise Alignment
IT Operational Responsibilities
- Ensure the timely investigation and troubleshooting of technical production incidents and provide support enhancements/resolution to scoped applications in a timely and accurate manner.
- Contribute to the setup and maintenance of a framework of application solutions to proactively monitor production systems and report any inconsistencies or potential problems
- Manage access permissions for direct reports on all relevant systems and environments
- Ensure identified security vulnerabilities are resolved in a timely fashion
- Contribute to the integrity, availability, and confidentiality of Questrade electronic data, client information, and systems
- Govern staff to ensure compliance with security and regulatory operating policies for computing and information technology
- Participate in the composition of scheduled releases and collaborate with production control on the tools and methodologies for effective and efficient code releases to production.
- Approve all production Change Requests (CRs) and Emergency Change Requests (ECRs) relating to scoped applications
- Identify any production risks pertaining to the scoped applications developed by the team
Leadership & People Development Responsibilities
- Manage the team of people who comprise the Digital Banking Engineering group.
- Align engineering teams and individual goals to the organization’s strategic goals.
- Forecast resourcing needs based on strategic goals, to ensure those are met.
- Be resourceful and elaborate alternative plans to address hiring needs if there are challenges fulfilling them.
- Be an advocate for the teams, removing efficiency blockers, and helping them get the tools and processes they need to be high performing, especially when this requires presenting a case to obtain support from the organization. Ensure this is done in a timely fashion, as this role is ultimately accountable for the team’s results.
- Provide mentoring to team members to assist them in reaching their career goals.
- Address team member performance issues in a timely manner, before it impacts deliverables significantly.
- Maintains a robust workforce of well-qualified IT professionals and develop a performance-oriented culture
- Fuel a passion within the team for designing and building innovative products
- Facilitate a work environment that fosters and supports ethical decision-making and actions by motivating, promoting, and modeling ethical behavior, as well as executing job responsibilities in accordance with our core values and ethics policie
Program Management and Project Management Responsibilities
- Support the Enterprise Delivery Framework, estimate the scope and costs associated with new initiatives to ensure ROI analysis is performed and the results are used to prioritize investment
- Actively contribute to the development of Questbank’s project delivery capability — continually building and enhancing its ability to efficiently deliver quality solutions for complex and challenging projects
- Maintain a program view for all active projects and the associated resource allocation within the scoped team.
- Regular reporting on project activities and resource allocation
- Identify any project or program risks pertaining to the projects led by the scoped team
So are YOU our next Director of Engineering, Banking? You are if you…
Skills & Knowledge Management
- Must have at least 10 years experience working through the development, release cycle, and delivering software products to market
- Minimum of 10 years of demonstrated ability to manage and develop high-performing design and development teams.
- Advanced expertise with modern practices of Agile, SAFe, DevOps, SRE, Chapters, and the application to large-scale complex technology organizations
- A proven track record of successfully leading complex, multidisciplinary talent teams in new endeavors and delivering solutions
- Broad knowledge of current and emerging technologies, technology directions, and strategic application to business needs, including the ability to differentiate between a relevant trend and hype
- Deep industry expertise and experience through a technology lens
- A proven track record of successfully maintaining a deep understanding of enterprise direction, goals, and industry and leading teams in alignment with business and IT strategies
- Has strong business acumen and business planning skills
- Very strong appreciation for the complexities of service delivery for highly regulated businesses
- Ability to improve operational efficiency, service delivery, and information management across the IT organization
Navigates Complexity & Ambiguity
- Energized when faced with ambiguity and uncertainty
- Manages the risk that comes with moving forward when the outcome isn't certain and leads others to adapt quickly to changing conditions
- Readily distinguishes between what’s relevant and what’s unimportant to make sense of complex situations
- Analyzes multiple and diverse sources of information to define problems accurately before moving to solutions
Drives Results
- Fearlessness in suggesting or backing big ideas. Tenacity in focusing on the information discovery process.
- Sets and accomplishes challenging goals in alignment with high standards
- Pursues everything with energy, drive, and the need to finish
- Persists in the face of challenges and setbacks
- Competes resourcefully, and takes calculated risks to achieve results.
- Outstanding analytical and problem-solving abilities.
Communicates Effectively, Persuades & Influences
- Excellent oral and written communication skills, including the ability to explain technology solutions in business terms, establish rapport and persuade others
- Shares ideas in a compelling manner that gains interest and commitment from others
- Adjusts communication content and style to meet the needs of various stakeholders
- Models and encourages the expression of diverse ideas and opinions
- Maintains strong relationships with recognized experts and with decision-makers inside and outside the work environment.
Drives engagement & fosters a growth mindset
- Creates a positive and motivating working environment
- Makes people feel that their contributions are visible and valued
- Lead others to view mistakes as opportunities to learn
- Creates a feeling of belonging and strong team morale
- Propels continuous improvement in engineering practices; has a knack for identifying and seizing opportunities for synergy and integration
Sounds like you? Click below to apply!
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At Questrade Financial Group of Companies, with multiple office locations around the world, we are committed to fostering a diverse, inclusive and accessible work environment. This is an environment where individuals are treated with dignity and respect. Here, the unique skills and experience you bring will be valued. You will be supported and motivated, so that you can harness your unlimited potential. Our team reflects the diversity of the communities we serve and operate in. Having a collaborative and diverse team helps us push boundaries to bring the future of fintech into existence—not only for the benefit of our customers, but for those who build their career with us.
Questrade Financial Group of companies Applicant Tracking System utilizes artificial intelligence (AI) for application screening. The AI system operates on predetermined criteria, with final decisions subject to human review.
Candidates selected for an interview will be contacted directly. If you require accommodation during the recruitment/selection process, please let us know and we will work with you to meet your needs.
