OverviewPenFed is hiring a (Hybrid) VP, Intelligent Banking Platform at our Tysons, Virginia location. The primary purpose of this position is to own the architecture, engineering, and continuous delivery of PenFed's first-party member digital banking platform, serving approximately three million members across web and native mobile.
The credit union builds and operates its own member experience and orchestration layers rather than relying solely on a packaged digital banking front end. The platform is supported by enterprise CRM, data, AI, analytics, and integration capabilities, and connects to the credit union's core banking and product systems of record. This role is accountable for the member-facing platform layers and their integrations; operational ownership of the underlying systems of record resides with designated enterprise technology and business owners, and the credit union retains institutional responsibility for the oversight of all third-party and vendor-provided services.
This role owns the platform and architecture behind a member experience aims to be predictive, insightful, and anticipatory - conversational and agent-enabled where those modalities genuinely serve the member, and deliberately not where they do not. The incumbent is accountable for the capability model, information model, and integration contracts that govern how that platform evolves, and for the engineering organization that builds and operates it, working in alignment with enterprise technology, security, data, risk, and compliance standards.
ResponsibilitiesReasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions. This is not intended to be an all-inclusive list of job duties and the position will perform other duties as assigned.
- Own end-to-end architecture and delivery of the member-facing digital banking platform across authenticated web and native mobile, including availability, performance, resiliency, and member-impacting incident response.
- Define and maintain the consumer banking capability model and information model, and steward canonical definitions of member, relationship, household, account, and consent through applicable enterprise data-governance processes across servicing, lending, deposits, and marketing.
- Set the target-state architecture for the platform's experience and orchestration layers within the assigned banking technology domain and govern the integration contracts through which the core ledger, card processor, payments, deposits, and lending providers are consumed.
- Partner across enterprise security, data, cloud, infrastructure, risk, and compliance disciplines to establish and execute the target state, ensuring platform architecture conforms to enterprise standards without duplicating or displacing those functions' accountability.
- Lead the architecture, engineering, evaluation, and production deployment of approved agent-enabled experiences, orchestration, and automation - implemented within applicable security, privacy, risk, compliance, and human-oversight frameworks - including bounded action registries, data grounding, policy constraints, human-oversight thresholds, auditability, and reversibility requirements for member-affecting actions.
- Establish and enforce a modality doctrine defining when conversational, agent-enabled, and direct-manipulation interactions are appropriate, grounded in member outcome, reversibility of the action, and regulatory exposure.
- Partner with the enterprise AI program, Enterprise Risk, and Compliance to operate within the credit union's AI governance and responsible AI standards; provide the technical evidence, documentation, and lineage required for internal audit, examination, and third-party assessment.
- Drive the unified member profile, including identity resolution, householding, consent management, and data quality sufficient to support predictive and anticipatory member experiences.
- Partner with Consumer Lending, Deposits, Cards, Home Lending, and Marketing leadership to shape and sequence the digital roadmap, translating product and P&L objectives into platform capability and delivery commitments.
- Own build, buy, and configure decisions for the platform layers within the role's assigned scope, supported by capability-level evidence rather than preference, and articulate those decisions to executive leadership and governance bodies as required.
- Advance continuous delivery, automated testing, secure development practice, and observability across the digital engineering organization, with measurable improvement in deployment frequency, change failure rate, and time to restore service.
- Ensure the platform and engineering practices within the role's assigned scope support compliance with applicable laws, regulations, supervisory guidance, and enterprise control frameworks - including, as applicable, consumer protection, fair lending, privacy, information security, electronic funds transfer, AI and model risk, third-party risk, and technology resilience requirements. Partner with Legal, Compliance, Risk, Privacy, and Information Security on the interpretation and implementation of those requirements.
- Ensure the platform can faithfully implement, transmit, display, and audit compliant outcomes originating from the responsible business and lending functions, including accurate and specific adverse action reasoning where decisioning is surfaced through digital channels.
- Serve as the senior technical representative for the member digital platform in examination, internal audit, and third-party assessment activity, including evidence of control ownership, data lineage, and change management.
- Manage third-party delivery partners, systems integrators, and platform vendors, including contractual performance, roadmap dependency, and concentration risk, in accordance with the credit union's third-party risk management program.
- Build, lead, and develop a director-level leadership team across platform engineering, mobile, architecture, and AI-enabled capability; establish clear decision rights and succession depth within the organization.
- Represent the digital platform in enterprise architecture, technology investment, and risk governance forums, and act as a credible technical voice with business-line leadership on member experience and product economics.
- Promote a culture of engineering excellence, psychological safety, and continuous improvement across employee and partner teams.
- Ensure employees and contingent workers within the function complete required information security training and adhere to applicable security policies; promptly escalate suspected policy violations or security incidents to Information Security, Human Resources, Legal, or other designated functions in accordance with established procedures.
*This role is responsible for ensuring business continuity.*
QualificationsEquivalent combination of education and experience is considered.
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or MIS.
- Minimum of twelve (12) years of progressive experience in software engineering, platform architecture, or digital product engineering, including at least five (5) years leading managers and/or multidisciplinary technology organizations with accountability for talent, budgets, delivery commitments, organizational performance, and technology decision-making.
- Minimum of eight (8) years in banking, credit union, or fintech environments, with demonstrated fluency in consumer banking economics including interchange, deposit pricing, loss performance, funding cost, and origination unit economics.
- Experience must include direct accountability for the architecture and engineering of a first-party or substantially custom member- or customer-facing platform operating in production at scale under regulatory supervision. Experience solely implementing or configuring a packaged digital banking platform is insufficient.
- Depth in the Salesforce ecosystem - including Experience Cloud, Financial Services Cloud, Data Cloud, and Agentforce - with the technical judgment to distinguish appropriate platform extension from accumulating technical debt.
- Experience delivering and operating native mobile applications at consumer scale, including release management, device fragmentation, and mobile-specific security controls.
- Experience with cloud-native architecture, event-driven integration, API design and management, modern analytics platforms, continuous delivery pipelines, and the consumption of enterprise identity and authentication services in a member-facing context.
- Working knowledge of applied AI and agent-enabled system design, including retrieval and grounding patterns, evaluation, guardrails, and the operational controls required to deploy such systems in a regulated environment.
- Familiarity with the supervisory landscape governing consumer digital banking at a [federally chartered / state-chartered, federally insured] credit union, including [NCUA / NCUA and applicable state] supervisory priorities and third-party risk expectations, FFIEC guidance, GLBA, Regulation E, Regulation B/ECOA, and UDAAP considerations in personalization and targeting.
- Familiarity with recognized control and risk frameworks applied to technology and AI, including the AICPA Trust Services Criteria used in SOC 2 examinations, the NIST AI Risk Management Framework, and enterprise risk management principles, and the ability to translate evolving supervisory direction into practical platform controls.
- Demonstrated experience defining and applying business and information architecture - capability models, canonical data definitions, and integration contracts - as instruments of decision-making rather than documentation exercises.
- Experience working with third-party delivery models, including offshore and nearshore teams, and managing systems integrator and vendor performance.
- Strong influencing skills, with a track record of establishing credibility with both engineering organizations and business-line leadership, and of driving alignment without positional authority.
- Strong change management experience in complex, regulated organizations.
- Exceptional analytical, written, verbal, presentation, and executive-level communication skills, including experience presenting to executive leadership, audit committees, or examiners.
- Experience using A.I. tools preferred.
Supervisory Responsibility- This position will supervise employees.
- This position will also have matrix leadership responsibilities.
- This position may manage contractual performance of third-party resources.
Licenses and CertificationsSalesforce Certified Technical Architect (CTA) preferred. Salesforce Certified System Architect, Salesforce Certified Application Architect, or equivalent demonstrated experience architecting complex, integrated Salesforce platforms at enterprise scale will also be considered.
Work EnvironmentWhile performing the duties of this job, the employee is regularly exposed to an indoor office setting with moderate noise.
*Most roles require working in an office setting with moderate noise and the ability to lift 25 pounds.*
TravelAbility to travel to various worksites and be on-call is required.
Pay Transparency The anticipated starting salary OR hourly range for this role is $152,200.00 - $309,960.00
This position is eligible for an organizational performance based annual bonus, subject to board discretion and approval.
This position is eligible for an individual performance based annual bonus.
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