Vice President, Platform Engineering (Digital & Wealth Management)
Role details
Job location
Tech stack
Job description
Join our team in Boston as a leader in shaping the future of modern, customer-facing digital platforms at scale. This senior engineering leadership role comes with two equally critical accountabilities:
- Horizontal technology ownership across all squads in our Digital & Wealth Management Technology organization-setting and enforcing the engineering standards, quality practices, reliability discipline, cloud-native patterns, and AI delivery guardrails that define "how we ship." This is ownership with outcomes, not advisory.
- Architecture influence through delivery excellence-partnering closely with Enterprise Architecture as a peer, bringing a strong engineering voice into major design decisions, and earning influence through evidence: operational reliability, secure-by-design delivery, and systems that perform at scale for participants, advisors, and plan sponsors.
If you''re the kind of leader who loves building strong engineering systems-standards, tooling, SRE, quality gates, and scalable platforms-while also shaping technical direction through credibility and results, this role is built for you., You''ll serve as a "horizontal leader" across the organization-raising engineering quality and reliability across multiple product squads while improving developer productivity and delivery velocity., * Define and enforce engineering standards across squads (approved stacks, patterns, API conventions, logging/error standards, libraries, and tech radar).
- Lead an engineering council to review cross-cutting proposals and ensure decisions are documented via Architecture Decision Records (ADRs).
- Own a technology debt register and drive remediation as a first-class engineering priority., * Establish non-negotiable quality gates across CI/CD (unit, integration, contract, end-to-end, performance, and accessibility).
- Standardize contract testing across API boundaries to protect customer journeys from regressions.
- Own performance/load testing and accessibility standards (e.g., WCAG 2.2 AA) as core quality requirements., * Define SLO/SLI frameworks and error budget policies for customer-facing services.
- Set on-call standards, incident response playbooks, and post-incident review (PIR) operating cadence.
- Drive resilience/chaos engineering practices so reliability risks are discovered before customers do., * Set patterns for containerization, CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code, GitOps workflows, secrets management, and deployment safety (canary/blue-green/feature flags).
- Ensure services operate within enterprise cloud landing zone guardrails while surfacing friction and improving standards with partners.
- Track and improve engineering health signals (DORA metrics) and cloud cost accountability (FinOps mindset)., * Define and govern how AI is built and shipped across the portfolio (LLM integration patterns, RAG standards, guardrails, validation, observability).
- Ensure AI output controls meet the expectations of a regulated, fiduciary context (auditability, human-in-the-loop where appropriate, and measurable quality).
- Enable engineering productivity with AI tooling and measure impact responsibly.
Raise the Bar on Security-by-Design
- Standardize application security practices across squads (SAST/DAST, dependency scanning, SBOM/image signing, secrets hygiene).
- Partner with Security/Risk teams to ensure strong controls for PII and customer-facing systems., * Build "golden path" templates, service catalogs, runbooks, and standardized local dev environments.
- Improve CI reliability and speed, reduce cognitive load, and make the paved road the easiest road.
Partner with Enterprise Architecture
- Be a trusted, high-signal contributor to architecture forums (e.g., ARB), influencing direction through delivery evidence and strong engineering judgment.
- Translate field learnings from platform execution into scalable architectural patterns across the enterprise.
Requirements
- Bachelor''s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, Finance, Information Systems, or a related field required; Master''s degree a plus., * 15 years of progressive experience across platform engineering, product, or technology leadership, with at least 5 years leading engineering or product organizations in a B2C or customer-facing environment
- Demonstrated success building and scaling complex, customer-facing platforms, translating customer needs into measurable business and engineering outcomes
- Experience operating as a horizontal leader, setting standards and driving consistency across multiple teams or domains-not just within a single product
Platform, Engineering & Delivery Leadership:
- Proven ability to lead distributed engineering teams (onshore/offshore) and drive execution across complex portfolios
- Strong technical grounding in modern architecture patterns, including APIs, event-driven systems, batch processing, webhooks, and SSO integrations
- Deep understanding of cloud-native engineering (AWS and/or Azure), DevSecOps practices, and automation at scale
- Experience improving developer experience, CI/CD pipelines, and engineering productivity at scale
Quality, Reliability & Security:
- Experience establishing quality engineering standards, reliability practices, and production observability
- Strong command of SRE principles, operational excellence, and customer-facing system reliability
- Working knowledge of application security and compliance within regulated environments, including customer data protection
AI, Data & Emerging Technology:
- Familiarity with AI/ML platforms and LLM integration patterns, with a practical understanding of applying emerging technologies to customer and platform design
- Ability to translate technology innovation into business value, customer outcomes, and scalable platforms
Technical Depth (Preferred):
- Prior hands-on experience with technologies such as .NET, Java (Spring Boot), APIs/microservices, SQL/Oracle, or containerized platforms (Kubernetes/OpenShift)
- Ability to engage deeply with engineering teams while operating effectively at the executive level, * Proven ability to align stakeholders and drive prioritization across a matrixed organization
- Strong problem-solving and critical thinking skills, with the ability to navigate ambiguity
- Excellent communication skills, translating complex technical concepts into clear business outcomes, * Knowledge of the retail advice and brokerage ecosystem (e.g., Pershing, Schwab, Envestnet, Apex)
- Understanding of wealth platform integrations, advisory models (UMA/SMA), and billing/commission structures
- Familiarity with industry and regulatory standards (e.g., Client, SEC, DTCC, LIMRA)
- Exposure to retirement, workplace solutions, wealth management, or benefits platforms