VP of Systems Engineering - USA

Bankjoy$150K — $180K *
Information Technology
8 - 10 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 10+ years of engineering experience, with at least 4 years in leadership roles overseeing QA, DevOps, or platform reliability teams.
  • Deep technical background in quality engineering and hands-on experience building automation frameworks.
  • Experience migrating automation frameworks in multi-platform environments, including web and native mobile applications.
  • Demonstrated success in shifting teams from manual-heavy to automation-first QA practices in a regulated environment.
  • Strong understanding of CI/CD pipelines and cloud infrastructure, particularly AWS, along with monitoring and observability expertise.
  • Familiarity with modern automation tools such as Playwright, Cypress, Appium, or equivalent.

Responsibilities

  • Lead Release Management, QA, and DevOps, ensuring high delivery quality and platform reliability.
  • Establish quality standards and processes across the engineering organization, coordinating with tech leads.
  • Provide hands-on technical leadership in solution design, architecture, and incident resolution.
  • Design and implement a comprehensive engineering quality framework across all value streams.
  • Drive the adoption of AI-assisted coding and testing practices within engineering teams.
  • Facilitate structured release processes and enforce go/no-go decisions in alignment with product leadership.
  • Champion DevOps strategies and oversee platform observability to enhance system reliability.

Benefits

  • Fast-paced and collaborative work environment.
  • 100% coverage of medical, dental, and vision premiums for individuals on the base plan (USA).
  • Comprehensive family health coverage under a single plan (Canada).
  • Retirement plan with 4% company matching.
  • 8 weeks paid parental leave for birthing parents, 4 weeks for non-birthing.
  • 3-5 weeks of paid time off depending on tenure, plus 5 health days and 15 holidays.
  • Remote-first culture offering flexibility and work-life balance.
Full Job Description
The Role

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.

What You'll Do

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


What You Bring
  • 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


Nice to Have
  • 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 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


#LI-Remote

About Bankjoy

Bankjoy is a financial services company that provides banking solutions for credit unions and community banks. The company's products include a range of software solutions for managing customer relationships, financial transactions, and other banking processes. Bankjoy was founded in 2015 and is headquartered in Southfield, Michigan.
Learn more about Bankjoy
Size
100 employees
Industry
Founded
2015

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