Vice President of Systems Engineering

🌐 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 shared 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, refinement, development, and delivery rather than only at sprint end.

• Build quality dashboards that provide engineering and leadership visibility into automation coverage, defect trends, test reliability, escaped defects, and release readiness.

Release Quality & Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Partner with Release Management to implement a structured release gate process, including readiness reviews and formal go/no-go decisions with explicit engineering, QA, and product accountability.

• Improve release consistency and repeatability through automation and disciplined Azure DevOps CI/CD practices.

• Work closely with Technical Support to connect production issues with engineering priorities and ensure client-impacting defects drive systemic improvements, not just individual fixes.

• Own post-release retrospectives for significant client-impacting releases, identifying systemic causes and driving corrective actions.

• Partner with product and engineering leadership to reinforce scope discipline, Agile planning, clear acceptance criteria, and early quality involvement.

• Establish measurable release performance using indicators such as deployment frequency, change failure rate, escaped defects, and recovery time.

DevOps & Platform Reliability

• Lead DevOps strategy and practices for Bankjoy's Microsoft .NET and Azure cloud-native platform.

• Provide technical leadership across Azure, AKS, Kubernetes, Helm, Azure DevOps CI/CD, infrastructure automation, observability, and production reliability.

• Drive repeatable and automated build, test, deployment, environment promotion, and rollback practices.

• Ensure platform engineering supports scalability, resiliency, observability, security, and operational reliability.

• Advance Site Reliability Engineering practices, including service health measurement, incident management, operational readiness, and continuous reliability improvement.

• Ensure infrastructure and deployment practices meet the security, compliance, and uptime expectations of regulated financial institutions.

AI-Driven Engineering Culture

• Champion AI-assisted coding and testing adoption across your teams in partnership with the VP of Engineering.

• Apply AI to quality engineering through test generation, automation maintenance, defect analysis, troubleshooting, and regression coverage.

• Drive measurable improvements in engineering productivity and quality while maintaining appropriate review, security, and quality controls.
  

🎯 What You Bring

• 10+ years of engineering experience with at least 4 years in engineering leadership managing QA, DevOps, platform engineering, release engineering, SRE, or related functions.

• Deep quality engineering background; you have personally built, rebuilt, or significantly modernized automation frameworks, not simply overseen them.

• Demonstrated success driving a transition from manual-heavy QA to automation-first quality engineering.

• Proven experience building quality automation across web, APIs/services, and native mobile applications.

• Experience implementing release gates and go/no-go processes, including making difficult release decisions under schedule pressure.

• Hands-on experience with modern automation technologies such as Playwright, Cypress, Appium, Maestro, or comparable tooling.

• Strong technical background in Microsoft .NET and Azure-based software environments.

• Experience operating cloud-native applications using Kubernetes, preferably Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS).

• Working knowledge of Helm, containerized application delivery, cloud infrastructure, monitoring, observability, and infrastructure automation.

• Strong experience with CI/CD and release automation, preferably Azure DevOps pipelines.

• Strong understanding of Agile software development practices and how development, QA, DevOps, and release management operate together throughout the delivery lifecycle.

• Strong background in platform reliability, production incident response, and root-cause analysis.

• Sufficient technical depth to engage directly in solution design, architecture discussions, delivery systems, production troubleshooting, and engineering trade-offs.

• Experience driving AI-assisted coding or testing adoption beyond individual usage and into engineering team practices.

• Strong cross-functional credibility, with experience partnering with engineering, product, technical support, release management, security, and other senior stakeholders.

• Excellent communication and organizational influence; able to establish and uphold quality standards without relying solely on hierarchy.
  

🌟 Nice to Have

• Experience in fintech, core banking, or digital banking platforms.

• Familiarity with credit union or community bank client environments.

• Familiarity with Angular, Swift, and Kotlin development environments.

• Experience with Infrastructure as Code, such as Terraform or comparable technologies.

• Experience with broader Azure services supporting modern SaaS platforms.

• Experience with SOC 2 Type II, PCI DSS, or similar regulatory compliance contexts.

• Experience managing QA teams through a transition from manual QA to quality engineering roles.

• Experience building or scaling an SRE or Platform Engineering function.

• Experience establishing DORA metrics, quality scorecards, or engineering reliability dashboards.

🎁 What You Get

• A fast-paced and collaborative environment 

• Competitive compensation

• Stock options at a well-funded startup

• We cover 100% of medical, dental, and vision premiums for individuals on our base plan, with significant contributions toward all other plan options (USA).

• We cover 100% of extended medical, dental, and vision premiums for you and your family under our single, comprehensive plan (Canada).

• Retirement plan with 4% company matching

• 8 weeks paid parental leave for birthing parents, 4 weeks for non-birthing

• 3-5 weeks PTO depending on tenure

• 5 health days

• 15 holidays

• End of year shutdown

• Performance-based bonuses

• Remote first culture

⚖️ Equal Employment Opportunities at Bankjoy

Bankjoy is committed to hiring talented and qualified individuals with diverse backgrounds for all of its tech, non-tech, and leadership roles. Bankjoy provides equal employment opportunities (EEO) to all employees and applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age or disability.

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