VP of Systems Engineering

Who you are

• 10+ years of engineering experience with at least 4 years in engineering leadership, managing QA, DevOps, or platform reliability teams
• Deep background in quality engineering; you have personally built or rebuilt automation frameworks, not just overseen them from a distance
• Proven experience migrating automation frameworks in a multi-platform environment (web and native mobile, iOS and Android)
• Demonstrated success driving a cultural shift from manual-heavy to automation-first QA in a fintech, banking, or similarly regulated environment
• Experience implementing release gate processes and enforcing go/no-go decisions under schedule pressure; you have called a no-go and held the line
• Hands-on experience with modern automation tooling: Playwright, Cypress, Appium, Maestro, or equivalent; familiarity with Angular, Swift, and Kotlin environments is a strong advantage
• Strong DevOps and platform reliability background: CI/CD pipelines, cloud infrastructure (AWS preferred), monitoring, and observability
• Experience driving AI coding and testing tool adoption across engineering teams: changed culture and productivity, not just personal usage
• Strong technical depth, able to engage directly in solution design, architecture discussions, production incident response, and root-cause analysis
• Strong cross-functional credibility; you have worked closely with technical support, release management, and product to solve systemic quality problems
• Excellent communication and organizational influence; you can hold senior stakeholders accountable to quality standards without relying on hierarchy
• Experience in fintech, core banking, or digital banking platforms
• Familiarity with credit union or community bank client environments
• Experience with SOC 2 Type II, PCI DSS, or similar regulatory compliance contexts
• Background working with multi-platform products serving both financial institutions and end consumers
• Experience managing QA teams through a transition from manual QA to quality engineering roles
• Experience building or managing an SRE function from scratch

What the job involves

• We are looking for a VP of System Engineering to own three of Bankjoy's most critical engineering functions: Release Management, QA, 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 including a Senior Platform Architect and DevOps Engineer
• 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 tech leads
• The ideal candidate has deep roots in quality engineering and platform reliability, has personally built or rebuilt automation programs in multi-platform environments, and has the organizational credibility to drive a cultural shift from manual-heavy to automation-first quality practices
• You know what it takes to deliver reliable, compliant software to regulated financial institutions, and you build systems that make quality visible, not judgment-based
• Engineering Leadership:
• Lead three core engineering functions (Release Management, QA, and DevOps), owning delivery quality, release discipline, and platform reliability across Bankjoy's engineering organization
• Maintain a dotted-line relationship with manual QA engineers embedded across product engineering value streams, setting quality standards and processes org-wide while coordinating with tech leads on day-to-day priorities
• Provide hands-on technical leadership, engaging directly with your team on solution design, architecture decisions, production incident response, and complex troubleshooting
• Partner closely with the VP of Engineering on cross-cutting initiatives including AI coding adoption, architectural standards, and release coordination
• Participate in senior leadership alongside the COO, VP of Engineering, and product leadership
• Quality Framework: Entire Engineering Organization:
• Design and implement Bankjoy's engineering quality framework across all value streams, setting standards for unit testing, integration testing, automated regression, and release readiness
• Own a modern multi-platform automation framework covering Angular, Swift, and Kotlin
• Define and enforce quality gates: explicit go/no-go release criteria that every value stream must meet, including automated coverage thresholds, defect standards, and QE sign-off
• Develop and coach the QA organization, elevating the team from manual QA toward a quality engineering model with automation-first practices
• Establish test data management, environment parity standards, and CI/CD quality integration across all value streams
• Build a quality dashboard visible to engineering and leadership (automation coverage, open defect counts, regression completion rates) so release readiness is transparent, not judgment-based
• Release Quality & Cross-Functional Collaboration:
• Partner with the Release Manager to implement a structured release gate process: mid-cycle readiness reviews and formal go/no-go decisions with explicit sign-offs from engineering, QA, and product
• Work closely with Technical Support to close the feedback loop between production issues and engineering prioritization, ensuring client-impacting defects drive process changes, not just fixes
• Own post-release retrospectives for every release that generates client impact, extracting systemic lessons and driving specific process changes with named owners and deadlines
• Partner with product leadership to enforce scope freeze discipline and ensure QA is involved in sprint planning and story grooming, not just at sprint end
• DevOps & Platform Reliability:
• Lead DevOps strategy, owning CI/CD pipelines, cloud infrastructure, monitoring, alerting, and platform reliability in partnership with Michael and Jason
• Drive platform observability, ensuring engineering and leadership have real-time visibility into system health, deployment frequency, change failure rate, and MTTR
• Oversee Site Reliability Engineering practices, building toward a future SRE function as Bankjoy scales
• Ensure infrastructure and deployment practices meet security, compliance, and uptime standards required by regulated financial institution clients
• AI-Driven Engineering Culture:
• Champion AI-assisted coding and testing adoption across your teams, working alongside the VP of Engineering on the org-wide AI initiative
• Embed AI productivity into engineering performance criteria: adoption, output velocity, code quality with AI, and knowledge sharing
• Ensure AI tools are used in QA as well as development: AI-assisted test generation, automated test maintenance, and prompt-driven regression coverage

Benefits

• A fast-paced and collaborative environment
• Stock options at a well-funded startup in high growth
• 100% medical, dental, and vision coverage for you. We cover families at 50%
• 401(k) plan with 4% match
• Performance-based bonuses
• Company-sponsored team meetups
• 4 weeks PTO and 5 health days
• Remote first company
• Career development
• Up to 8 weeks of parental leave
• Inclusive and open environment