Job Description
Join a Challenger
Being a traditional bank just isn’t our thing, so we challenge ourselves to get creative in providing innovative banking solutions for Canadians.
How do we get there? With a talented team of inquisitive and agile challengers that break through the status quo. So, if you’re passionate about redefining the future of banking—while having fun—this could be your next big opportunity.
Our company continues to grow, and today we serve more than 780,000 customers across Canada through Equitable Bank, Canada’s Challenger Bank™, and have been around for more than 50 years. Equitable Bank’s wholly-owned subsidiary, Concentra Bank, supports credit unions across Canada that serve more than six million members. Together we have over $138 billion in combined assets under management and administration, with a clear mandate to drive change in Canadian banking to enrich people’s lives. Our customers have named our EQ Bank digital platform (eqbank.ca) one of the top banks in Canada on the Forbes World’s Best Banks list since 2021.
The Work
The Senior Director provides strategic leadership to accelerate technology integration and platform modernization by enabling teams with clear guardrails, reusable patterns, and automated governance. Rather than acting solely as a centralized control point, this role operates as an enterprise-wide architecture ‘force multiplier’—empowering domain and platform teams to deliver safely at speed while converging on a cohesive target-state. This role serves as the architecture integration leader for M&A, translating deal intent into executable transition states, sequencing, and platform convergence outcomes.
A critical focus is the integration of capabilities into the Bank’s core and digital ecosystem, establishing repeatable integration playbooks, canonical interfaces, and transition states that reduce risk while increasing time-to-value and synergy. The Senior Director drives measurable outcomes—faster delivery cycles, reduced complexity, TCO and improved resiliency—so the Bank can operate with challenger-bank agility in a regulated environment.
Key Responsibilities:
- Build and maintain an enterprise capability model and value-stream maps to anchor integration decisions—mapping capabilities to applications, data domains, and owners; identifying overlaps/gaps; and using this model to prioritize platform convergence, sequencing, and investment decisions.
- Develop transition states and sequencing plans to guide system consolidation, modernization, and decommissioning throughout the integration period.
- Establish architectural guardrails, standards, non‑functional requirements (NFRs), and design principles that govern cross‑functional decision‑making.
- Operationalize “architecture as code” by embedding standards and NFRs into pipelines, reference implementations, reusable templates, and automated checks (e.g., security, resilience, data controls), enabling self-service delivery at scale with consistent outcomes.
- Lead architecture reviews and manage the architectural risk register to ensure stability and compliance during major migration events.
- Provide architectural oversight for Day‑1, Day‑100, and major cutover activities, ensuring resilience, performance, and security requirements are met.
- Drive platform rationalization decisions, identifying redundant systems and recommending pathways to reduce complexity and operational cost.
- Collaborate with Technology, Retail Banking, Data Strategy, Cybersecurity, Operations, Infrastructure, and PMO teams to align design choices.
- Present architectural trade‑offs to senior executives with clear business, cost, risk, and timeline implications.
- Ensure all architecture activities support synergy goals, operational readiness, and long‑term scalability.
Driving Transformation and Integration
- Lead enterprise‑wide architecture integration for core banking, digital channels, payments, risk systems, and supporting platforms.
- Govern architecture for system cutovers, cloud migrations, and infrastructure consolidation.
- Guide the creation of architectural artifacts, transition maps, and decision records that drive clarity across teams.
- Lead the integration architecture across customer journeys, data domains, security/IAM, and integration patterns—defining canonical API/event contracts, transition states, and parallel-run / cut
Core Mandates for Success
- Partner closely with senior leaders across Technology, Data, Infrastructure, Cybersecurity, Retail Banking, and PMO.
- Provide leadership to solution architects, technical leads, and integration consultants throughout the program
- Mentor and grow a high-performing architecture by coaching on pragmatic frameworks, “just-enough” governance, and modern tooling (reference architectures, templates, decision records), raising overall architecture maturity and delivery throughput.
- Lead the integration operating model for architecture across internal teams, integration partners, and vendors—driving decision velocity, dependency clarity, and shared delivery standards during M&A execution.
Let’s Talk About You!
- Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Architecture, or a related discipline.
- 10+ years of banking experience and 5–10 years in enterprise architecture, gained within financial services or consulting environments.
- Demonstrated ability to prototype and operationalize architecture decisions—using spike solutions, reference implementations, and experimentation to quickly test assumptions, quantify trade-offs, and inform executive decisions in fast-moving integration programs.
- Proven experience leading M&A integration architecture (pre-close planning through Day‑1/Day‑100 and beyond), including platform convergence, data/domain integration, cutover strategy, and decommissioning—ideally in regulated financial services and/or consulting-led environments.
- Expertise across architecture domains such as cloud, data analytics, APIs/integration, security, infrastructure, digital channels, and core banking platforms.
- Strong understanding of NFRs including reliability, performance, scalability, disaster recovery, and security.
- Ability to design and govern complex multi‑platform ecosystems.
- Strong leadership presence with the ability to simplify complexity and influence senior decision‑makers.
- Demonstrated ability to lead, mentor, and develop architects—building shared standards, improving architectural decision quality, and scaling consistent practices across a federated organization.
- Excellent communication skills and the ability to facilitate cross‑functional alignment.
- Strategic mindset paired with operational awareness.
- Architecture certifications such as TOGAF, SAFe Architect, or cloud architecture certifications are an asset.
What we offer [For full-time permanent roles]
💰 Competitive discretionary bonus
✨ Market leading RRSP match program
🩺 Medical, dental, vision, life, and disability benefits
📝 Employee Share Purchase Plan
👶🏽 Maternity/Parental top-up while you care for your little one
🏝 Generous vacation policy and personal days
🖥 Virtual events to connect with your fellow colleagues
🎓 Professional development and comprehensive Career Development program
💛 A fulfilling opportunity to join one of the top FinTechs and help create a new kind of banking experience
The incumbent will be working hybrid and in office time will be spent working from Equitable Bank’s additional office space located at 2200-25 Ontario Street, Toronto, ON.
Equitable Bank is deeply committed to inclusion. Our organization is stronger and our employees thrive when we honour and celebrate everyone’s diverse experiences and perspectives. In tandem with that commitment, we support and encourage our staff to grow not just in their career path, but personally as well.
We commit to providing a barrier-free recruitment process and work environment for all applicants. Please let us know of any accommodations needed so that you can bring your best self to the application process and beyond. All candidates considered for hire must successfully pass a criminal background check and credit check to qualify for hire. While we appreciate your interest in applying, an Equitable recruiter will only contact leading candidates whose skills and qualifications closely match the requirements of the position.
We can’t wait to get to know you!
