VP of Systems Engineering

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.

• 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.

• 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