VP of Engineering

Who this role is best for

Derived from job-description analysis by Serendipath's career intelligence engine.

Skills & requirements

About the 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 Engineering to lead four of Bankjoy's eight engineering value streams and own the quality engineering framework 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 engineering teams across Banking Core Integration, Business Banking, Vendor Integration, and Client Analytics — while building the quality standards, automation framework, and release discipline that raise the bar for all eight value streams.

The ideal candidate has deep roots in quality engineering, has personally rescued or rebuilt automation programs in multi-platform environments, and has the organizational credibility to drive a shift from manual-heavy to automation-first quality culture. You have led engineering managers and senior ICs, partnered closely with technical support and release operations, and know what it takes to deliver reliable software to regulated financial institutions.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

Engineering Leadership

• Lead four value streams — Banking Core Integration, Business Banking, Vendor Integration, and Account Acquisition — owning delivery, velocity, and technical excellence across each

• Manage and develop engineering managers, tech leads, and a Principal Engineer, building a high-performing organization that uses AI-assisted development as a core practice

• Provide hands-on technical leadership by partnering with tech leads on solution design, architectural reviews, production incident management, and complex troubleshooting, while remaining close enough to the systems to guide critical engineering decisions.

• Partner closely with the VP of Platform Engineering on cross-cutting initiatives including AI coding adoption, release coordination, architectural standards and DevOps.

• Drive quarterly engineering OKRs focused on AI productivity, code quality, and delivery velocity

• Participate in senior leadership alongside the COO, VP of Platform Engineering, and product leadership

Quality Framework — Entire Engineering Organization

• Design and implement Bankjoy's engineering quality framework across all eight 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

• Lead and develop a QA organization of eight manual QA engineers and two dedicated automation QA engineers, working with the QA manager to elevate the team toward a quality engineering model

• Establish a test data management layer, 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 and 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 QEs are involved in sprint planning and story grooming, not just sprint end

AI-Driven Engineering Culture

• Champion AI-assisted coding adoption across your four value streams — working alongside the VP of Platform Engineering who leads the org-wide AI initiative

• Embed AI productivity into engineering performance criteria — adoption and fluency, 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

REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS

Must Have

• 10+ years of engineering experience with at least 4 years in engineering leadership, managing engineering managers and senior individual contributors

• 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

• Experience driving AI coding tool adoption across engineering teams — changed culture and productivity, not just personal usage

• Strong technical depth with the ability to engage directly in solution design, architecture discussions, production incident response, root-cause analysis, and complex debugging alongside engineering leads and senior engineers

• Ability to balance strategic leadership with operational execution, remaining close enough to systems and engineering workflows to make informed technical and delivery decisions in high-pressure environments

• Strong cross-functional credibility — you have worked closely with technical support, release management, and product to solve systemic quality problems, not just engineering-internal ones

• Excellent communication and organizational influence skills — 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

🎁 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

⚖️ EQUAL EMPLOYMENT OPPORTUNITIES AT

Source: Bankjoy careers (Ashby)