Vice-President, Application Engineering Technology

We’re building a relationship-oriented bank for the modern world. We need talented, passionate professionals who are dedicated to doing what’s right for our clients.

At CIBC, we embrace your strengths and your ambitions, so you are empowered at work. Our team members have what they need to make a meaningful impact and are truly valued for who they are and what they contribute.

To learn more about CIBC, please visit CIBC.com

The Vice-President, Application Engineering Technology is accountable for driving the strategic vision, innovation, and operational excellence of essential foundational technical services across CIBC. The Vice-President will ensure that these platforms are robust, secure, and scalable to meet the evolving needs of the bank and its customers, with a strong emphasis on application architecture and defining technical standards.  Inclusive in this mandate is accountability for CIBC’s Client Data catalogue, Message Transfer, Authentication, API framework and Container strategy.

Key outcomes for this position include:

• Ensuring availability of technology solutions that meet the long-term needs of the associated businesses in delivering products and services to CIBC clients.

• A leading edge technology strategy that provides cost-effective solutions to support the strategic and business plans and objectives of the business partners.

• A highly trained technology workforce that is client focused, technologically proficient, and knowledgeable of CIBC businesses.

CIBC employee experience principles:

• Always professional… so our team members can excel and be their best professional self.

• Radically simple… so our team members can focus on what they need to do and make an impact.

• Genuinely caring… so our team members can feel valued for who they are and what they contribute.

CIBC leadership capabilities:

• Envisions the future…to innovate purposefully to create new value and harness new capabilities in order to meet the evolving needs of our diverse stakeholders.

• Inspires hearts and minds…to build an inclusive culture where we make bold choices, collaborate, and empower others to take chances and do what’s right for our stakeholders.

• Drives action and impact, together…to align with urgency around what matters, making decisions with speed and always making a real difference.

What You’ll be Doing

• Strategic Vision: Define and execute a strategic roadmap for Shared Platform Technology and shared platform technology that aligns with CIBC's overall business objectives and enhances competitive advantage.

• Application Architecture: Lead the design and implementation of application architecture frameworks that ensure scalability, reliability, and performance of critical platforms. Establish best practices for application development and integration.

• Technical Standards: Define and enforce technical standards and guidelines for platform development, ensuring consistency, security, and compliance across all technology initiatives.

• Platform Management: Oversee the architecture, development, and maintenance of critical technology platforms, ensuring high availability, performance, and security

• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner with business units and senior leadership to identify technology needs, prioritize initiatives, and ensure seamless integration of platforms across the organization.

• Innovation Leadership: Foster a culture of innovation by exploring emerging technologies and trends, implementing best practices, and driving continuous improvement in platform capabilities.

• Risk and Compliance: Ensure that all technology platforms comply with regulatory standards and internal policies, managing risks associated with technology operations.

• Budget and Resource Management: Develop and manage the budget for shared platform technology, optimizing resource allocation and ensuring cost-effective operations.

• Team Development: Lead and mentor a diverse team of technology professionals, promoting professional growth and a collaborative work environment.

What We’re Looking For

Technology as a business enabler

• Optimizes for outcomes (efficiency, growth, risk reduction) with explicit non-functional requirements (availability, latency, throughput, RTO/RPO, data residency).

• Makes disciplined build/buy/partner decisions using ROI and total cost of ownership (TCO) models that include licensing, cloud egress, support, staffing, reliability targets, and deprecation costs.

• Uses evidence-based PoCs, performance benchmarks, and integration risk assessments to de‑risk choices.

Financial services domain expertise

• Deep knowledge of banking and wealth domains (payments, retail, wealth), product mechanics (mutual funds, ETFs, derivatives), and client lifecycle flows.

• Strong grasp of regulatory obligations and control design (OSFI B‑13, AML/KYC, PIPEDA, PCI DSS), including records retention, data residency, and model governance.

• Familiar with industry standards and rails (e.g., ISO 20022, SWIFT, real‑time payments) and how to embed controls and monitoring without degrading client experience.

Comprehensive enterprise technology knowledge

• Mastery across mainframe, distributed systems, and hybrid cloud; secure connectivity across PC/LAN/WAN with zero‑trust principles, network segmentation, and mTLS.

• Architecture depth in REST/gRPC APIs, microservices, and event‑driven systems (pub/sub, CQRS, idempotency, schema evolution); robust integration patterns (sagas, outbox/CDC, bulkheads, circuit breakers).

• Observability first: metrics, logs, traces (e.g., OpenTelemetry), SLOs/error budgets, and production telemetry as design inputs.

• Modern delivery at scale: CI/CD, DevSecOps, trunk‑based development, GitOps, IaC, automated testing (unit/integration/contract), progressive delivery (canary/blue‑green), and SRE practices.

• Pragmatic legacy modernization (strangler‑fig, API/event facades, data virtualization) that preserves reliability and compliance.

• Familiarity with CIBC’s mainframe environment and how to integrate it safely into modern platforms.

Operations excellence

• Designs for reliability, performance, and resilience with explicit SLIs/SLOs (p95/p99 latency, availability, throughput) and capacity models.

• Mature incident/change/problem management, blameless post‑mortems, chaos and DR exercises to validate RTO/RPO; comprehensive runbooks and automation to reduce toil.

• FinOps discipline: cost observability, workload right‑sizing, autoscaling guardrails, and run‑cost optimization without compromising controls.

Strategic, business, and financial planning

• Builds multi‑year roadmaps, capability maps, and architecture runways aligned to business strategy and regulatory commitments.

• Applies portfolio prioritization frameworks, scenario planning, and dependency mapping; manages deprecation and technical debt with measurable outcomes.

• Transparent CapEx/OpEx governance tied to unit economics and business value, with clear assumptions and sensitivity analyses.

Systems thinking with hands‑on credibility

• Articulates enterprise architecture vision using domain‑driven design, bounded contexts, and event‑driven patterns; aligns socio‑technical systems with desired outcomes.

• Maintains technical depth to review designs and code, diagnose distributed failures (trace‑based root cause), and validate performance bottlenecks.

• Operates at the right altitude—zooming from portfolio strategy to code/design reviews as needed.

Technical competence

• Proficient in enterprise languages (e.g., Java, C#, Go, Python); conducts code and design reviews for correctness, reliability, security, and performance (concurrency, memory/I/O, algorithmic efficiency).

• Cloud and platforms: hybrid cloud architecture, container orchestration, service mesh, secrets management, IAM (RBAC/ABAC), encryption in transit/at rest, key management, policy‑as‑code, and large‑scale observability.

• Data and integration: event streaming, CDC, schema governance/lineage, relational and NoSQL systems, consistency models, partitioning, and PII protection (masking/tokenization); secure integration with core/legacy platforms.

• Security and compliance: DevSecOps, threat modeling (e.g., STRIDE), secure SDLC gates, SAST/DAST/SCA/IaC scanning, supply‑chain security (SBOM/signing), PAM; designs that map explicitly to regulatory control objectives.

Advanced people leadership

• Scales and motivates multidisciplinary teams (software, data, platform, QA, security) with clear technical career paths and coaching for senior engineers and managers.

• Establishes engineering standards, golden paths, reusable platforms, and architecture governance (ADRs, review boards) to drive consistency and speed.

• Designs org structures around domains/bounded contexts to improve flow and accountability.

Executive communication and presence

• Translates complex technical and risk concepts into concise narratives for executives, boards, and regulators; produces crisp RFCs, decision memos, and steering updates.

• Frames options with quantified trade‑offs, dependencies, and control impacts; uses clear go/no‑go criteria and decision logs.

• Communicates control intent and evidence with audit‑ready artifacts and metrics.

What CIBC Offers

At CIBC, your goals are a priority. We start with your strengths and ambitions as an employee and strive to create opportunities to tap into your potential. We aspire to give you a career, rather than just a paycheck.

• We work to recognize you in meaningful, personalized ways including a competitive salary, incentive pay, banking benefits, a benefits program*, defined benefit pension plan*, an employee share purchase plan, a vacation offering, wellbeing support, and MomentMakers, our social, points-based recognition program.

• Our spaces and technological toolkit will make it simple to bring together great minds to create innovative solutions that make a difference for our clients.

• We cultivate a culture where you can express your ambition through initiatives like Purpose Day; a paid day off dedicated for you to use to invest in your growth and development.

*Subject to plan and program terms and conditions

What you need to know

• CIBC is committed to creating an inclusive environment where all team members and clients feel like they belong. We seek applicants with a wide range of abilities and we provide an accessible candidate experience. If you need accommodation, please contact [email protected]

• You need to be legally eligible to work at the location(s) specified above and, where applicable, must have a valid work or study permit.

• We may ask you to complete an attribute-based assessment and other skills tests (such as simulation, coding, French proficiency, MS Office). Our goal for the application process is to get to know more about you, all that you have to offer, and give you the opportunity to learn more about us.

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