VP of Systems Engineering - USA

About this role

🌐 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 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 t

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