Canada is experiencing a period of intense economic and technological change that won't wait for traditional timelines. To adapt, BDC is founding a new AI-native incubator with the mission to discover new ways to support Canadian entrepreneurs.

At the incubator, our goal isn't to study the future, it's to create it. To do this, we are recruiting a small team of experienced AI-native builders who will work on a blank canvas to reimagine how banking for small and medium-sized businesses works.

We sit at the intersection of strategy, technology, and execution. We work with startup speed, challenge existing assumptions, and focus on delivering practical outcomes that will meaningfully change how BDC serves entrepreneurs.

You will be joining a team with strong executive sponsorship and a mandate to experiment, learn quickly, and turn promising ideas into real solutions. Our success will not be measured by how many ideas we generate; it will be measured by the value we create for employees, clients, and Canadian businesses.

In this role, the Delivery Lead is in the room for most of what matters, and owns what happens after the room empties. Half the job is making the incubator's work legible to the rest of the organisation. The other half is making sure the incubator finishes what its accountable for. Your voice and your opinions will matter. You will be expected to use them in front of our stakeholders and some of the most senior positions of the organisation.

What you'll own

• The room. You're in most meetings with the head of our AI-Native Incubator. You leave with the decisions, the owners, and the dates. Nothing important lives only in one person's head.
• Translation. Turn what the incubator is building into business cases, briefing notes, and executive updates that survive contact with finance, risk, legal, and communications.
• Delivery cadence. Keep the team shipping against a plan. You're not the tech lead and you're not writing the code, but nothing slips quietly on your watch.
• Internal navigation. Map who needs to say yes, get to them early, and keep partner business units warm between asks.
• Proxy authority. Represent the incubator when the head of this project is not there.
• Saying no. Track what we've committed to versus what we can actually absorb and communicate when the honest answer is no. Feel free to challenge ideas.
• Evidence. Track what the incubator's work is actually producing so we can defend it with numbers instead of enthusiasm.

Who you are

• Comfortable being the second-most-senior person in a room and the most prepared one.
• Fluent in both operating cultures: startup pace and institutional process. You can tell which one a given problem needs.
• Fully bilingual (you'll write and present in both languages, not just understand them).
• Low ego about credit, high standards about follow-through.
• Genuinely interested in Canadian entrepreneurs. This work only matters if it reaches them.

Background that fits

• At least 10 years in strategy, consulting, corporate development, or operations leadership. MBA is a fit but not required.
• Has worked adjacent to technical teams without being an engineer (you can hold your own on architecture tradeoffs without pretending to design them).
• Experience inside a regulated or public-sector institution, or a strong reason you'll adapt fast to one.
• Track record with founder-type leaders who generate more ideas than any team can absorb.

• Keeps their shape under pressure when priorities collide, timelines move, and the team needs clarity instead of noise.
• Builds cross-functional partnerships before they are urgently needed and keeps them strong between asks.
• Can work a stakeholder map with judgement, diplomacy, and enough backbone to negotiate real trade-offs.
• Adapts quickly when the business need, the process, or the technology changes mid-flight.

What makes this hard

We're a new team inside an institution that predates all of us. You'll spend real time on internal alignment that doesn't look like progress and is. The incubator's credibility gets built in small, unglamorous increments.