VP of Systems Engineering - Canada

🌐 Who We Are
Bankjoy is a Y Combinator and Bessemer Venture Partner backed FinTech startup. We are changing the way community banks and credit unions do business, enabling them to become tech-driven and digital first. Bankjoy provides modern digital banking products including mobile banking, online banking, online account opening, loan origination, and conversational AI. Our mission is to revolutionize banking tech infrastructure by leading digital transformation at financial institutions — big and small.
💼 The Role
We are looking for a VP of Systems Engineering to own three of Bankjoy's most critical engineering functions: Release Management, Quality Engineering, and DevOps , and to build the quality engineering framework that raises the bar across the entire engineering organization.
This is a hands-on leadership role at a critical inflection point in Bankjoy's growth. You will directly lead Release Management, a QA organization including a QA Lead and automation engineers, and a DevOps team responsible for platform delivery and reliability. You will also maintain a dotted-line relationship with manual QA engineers embedded across engineering value streams, setting quality standards and ensuring consistent practices while those engineers report directly to their respective technical leads.
Bankjoy is a Microsoft .NET development organization operating a cloud-native Azure platform , primarily hosted on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), deployed through Helm, and delivered through Azure DevOps CI/CD pipelines using Agile development practices.
The ideal candidate has deep roots in quality engineering , has personally built or rebuilt automation programs in complex, multi-platform environments, and has the technical breadth to lead Release Management, DevOps, and platform reliability alongside QA. You have the organizational credibility to drive a cultural shift from manual-heavy testing toward automation-first quality practices and engineering ownership of quality .
You know what it takes to deliver reliable, compliant software to regulated financial institutions, and you build systems that make quality and release readiness visible, measurable, and repeatable rather than judgment-based .
🧠 What You'll Do
Engineering Leadership
- Lead Release Management, Quality Engineering, and DevOps , owning delivery quality, release discipline, and platform reliability across Bankjoy.

- Maintain a dotted-line relationship with QA engineers embedded across product engineering value streams, establishing organization-wide quality standards while coordinating execution with technical leads.

- Provide hands-on technical leadership, engaging directly in architecture decisions, delivery practices, production incidents, root-cause analysis, and complex troubleshooting.

- Partner closely with the VP of Engineering on cross-cutting initiatives including engineering standards, architectural direction, AI-assisted development, and release coordination.

- Participate in senior leadership alongside the COO, VP of Engineering, and product leadership.

Quality Engineering Framework
- Design and implement Bankjoy's engineering quality framework across all value streams, establishing standards for unit, integration, API, automated regression, and end-to-end testing.

- Own a modern multi-platform automation strategy covering Angular web applications, .NET APIs and services, Swift iOS applications, and Kotlin Android applications.

- Define and enforce quality gates and release readiness criteria , including automated testing, defect standards, regression completion, and QE sign-off.

- Develop and coach the QA organization, elevating the team from manual-heavy testing toward an automation-first quality engineering model .

- Establish test data management, environment standards, and CI/CD quality integration across engineering.

- Embed quality throughout Agile development by ensuring QA and automation are considered during planning, refinem