CIBC

Director, Product Owner - Process Optimization - Simplii Financial

CIBC$125K — $150K *
Finance & Insurance
5 - 7 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 7+ years in process optimization, business transformation, or related fields
  • Proven experience in operational excellence in a regulated banking environment
  • Strong understanding of risks and compliance related to banking operations
  • Familiarity with automation, AI, and digital banking technologies
  • Excellent leadership skills with a focus on measurable outcomes
  • Ability to navigate ambiguity and develop actionable strategies
  • Experience with cross-functional collaboration and influencing across various teams

Responsibilities

  • Define vision, roadmap, and backlog priorities for the Process Optimization squad
  • Lead process transformation by mapping current processes and designing improvements
  • Utilize modernization to reshape banking operations from first principles
  • Identify and implement automation and AI opportunities for operational efficiency
  • Embed compliance and control measures into processes from inception
  • Break work into deliverable epics and stories to manage agile delivery
  • Ensure alignment on priorities and maintain focus on measurable outcomes

Benefits

  • Flexible work environment with a hybrid work arrangement
  • Personalized recognition programs and incentives
  • Support for health and wellbeing
  • Paid day off for personal growth and development opportunities
  • Defined benefit pension plan and employee share purchase options
Full Job Description
At Simplii Financial, we're reshaping how millions of Canadians manage their finances. As the Director, Product Owner, Process Optimization, you'll lead the vision, roadmap, and priorities for Simplii's Process Optimization squad. You'll identify high-impact opportunities across core operational processes and guide the squad from discovery through delivery, with a focus on simplifying work, improving reliability, and creating better outcomes for clients and team members. A key priority in this role is using modernization as an opportunity to redesign how the bank operates, rather than replicating fragmented or manual legacy processes on new platforms. You'll work across business, operations, technology, and control teams to design future-state processes that are efficient, scalable, and resilient. Throughout, you'll bring strong business judgment, leadership, and a practical mindset that keeps the team focused on measurable progress.

At Simplii we enable the work environment most optimal for you to thrive in your role. You'll have the flexibility to manage your work activities within a hybrid work arrangement where you'll spend 2-3 days per week on-site, while other days will be remote.

How you'll succeed
  • Set direction - Define the vision, roadmap, and backlog priorities for the Process Optimization squad. Make clear trade-off decisions that balance business value, client and employee impact, operational efficiency, risk reduction, and long-term simplification.
  • Drive process transformation - Lead the team in identifying operational pain points, mapping current-state processes, and designing practical future-state improvements. Increase straight-through processing, reduce manual effort, simplify handoffs, and improve reliability across core operational activities.
  • Envision and build a modern bank - Use Simplii's modernization program to rethink from first principles how a modern digital bank should operate.
  • Advance automation and AI opportunities - Identify where automation, workflow tools, process mining, document intelligence, decision support, and artificial intelligence can improve speed, quality, controls, and resilience. Ensure solutions are practical, measurable, well-governed, and appropriate for a regulated banking environment.
  • Embed controls by design - Work closely with risk and control partners to build compliance, fraud, anti-money laundering, privacy, security, auditability, and operational resilience into processes from the start. Help shift from manual controls to preventative, automated, and data-informed controls.
  • Lead agile delivery - Break work into clear epics, stories, and sprint-level outcomes that create visible progress. Keep the squad aligned on priorities, accountable for delivery, and focused on outcomes that are adopted, measured, and connected to the broader operating model.


Who you are
  • You bring deep business and operational insight. You understand how banking works across products, channels, operations, technology, risk, and enterprise partners. You can identify where the biggest process improvement opportunities exist and connect them to meaningful business outcomes.
  • You know how to turn ambiguity into action. You can take a broad or complex challenge and define a clear path forward, including priorities, sequencing, success measures, and practical next steps.
  • You have strong leadership and transformation experience. You bring experience leading teams, process optimization, business transformation, business architecture, operations improvement, or related cross-functional change in a complex organization. You're confident shaping roadmaps and connecting delivery to measurable results.
  • You're skilled in process design and continuous improvement. You have experience diagnosing operational pain points, mapping current-state processes, and designing better future states. You're familiar with methods such as root-cause analysis, value-stream thinking, process mapping, process mining, service design, and continuous improvement.
  • You understand risk in a regulated environment. You have sound knowledge of risk, compliance, privacy, security, fraud, anti-money laundering, auditability, and operational resilience requirements. You apply this knowledge to ensure process improvements are both effective and appropriately controlled.
  • You influence across teams. You can build trust and alignment with senior leaders, subject matter experts, engineers, architects, operations partners, data teams, and control partners. Experience in banking, financial services, fintech, digital operations, consulting, or another regulated high-volume environment is strongly preferred, and exposure to modernization, workflow, APIs, automation, or AI-enabled operations is an asset.
  • Values matter to you. You bring your real self to work, and you live our values - trust, teamwork, and accountability.

#LI-TA

What CIBC Offers

At CIBC, your goals are a priority. We start with your strengths and ambitions as an employee and strive to create opportunities to tap into your potential. We aspire to give you a career, rather than just a paycheck.
  • We work to recognize you in meaningful, personalized ways including a competitive salary, incentive pay, banking benefits, a benefits program*, defined benefit pension plan*, an employee share purchase plan, a vacation offering, wellbeing support, and MomentMakers, our social, points-based recognition program.
  • Our spaces and technological toolkit will make it simple to bring together great minds to create innovative solutions that make a difference for our clients.
  • We cultivate a culture where you can express your ambition through initiatives like Purpose Day; a paid day off dedicated for you to use to invest in your growth and development.


*Subject to plan and program terms and conditions

Job Location
Toronto-161 Bay St., 4th

Employment Type
Regular

Weekly Hours
37.5

Skills
Analytical Thinking, Backlog Management, Communication, Data-Driven Decision Making, Domain Knowledge, Influencing Without Authority, Mentorship, Negotiation, Problem Solving, Product Portfolio Strategy, Product Roadmap Development, Risk Management, Sprint Planning, Stakeholder Management, User Story Mapping

About CIBC

The Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce is a Canadian multinational banking and financial services corporation headquartered in Toronto, Ontario. The bank is headquartered at Commerce Court in the city's Financial District. CIBC's Institution Number is 010, and its SWIFT code is CIBCCATT. It is one of two Big Five banks founded in Toronto, the other being the Toronto-Dominion Bank. The Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce was formed through the June 1, 1961, merger of the Canadian Bank of Commerce and the Imperial Bank of Canada, the largest merger between chartered banks in Canadian history. The bank has four strategic business units: Canadian Personal and Business Banking, Canadian Commercial Banking and Wealth Management, U.S. Commercial Banking and Wealth Management, and Capital Markets. It has international operations in the United States, the Caribbean, Asia, and United Kingdom; Globally. CIBC serves more than eleven million clients, and has over 40,000 employees. The company ranks at number 172 on the Forbes Global 2000 listing.
Learn more about CIBC
Market Cap
$43.5 billion
Industry
Founded
1867
5 Year Trend
+8.8%

Similar Jobs

More Jobs at CIBC

More Finance & Insurance Jobs

Find similar Director, Product Owner - Process Optimization - Simplii Financial jobs: