Director of Engineering, Digital Channels

About Manulife Bank Technology Manulife is a leading international financial services provider, helping people make decisions easier and lives better. At Manulife Bank Technology, we are reimagining digital banking in Canada. Our mission is to deliver secure, scalable, and customer-centric platforms that power everyday advisor and banking experiences. We operate with a cloud-first mentality, agile delivery practices, and a commitment to engineering excellence.

We are seeking a transformative engineering leader to join as Director of Engineering, Digital Channels  for our Digital Servicing Agile Release Train (ART), which includes mobile and online banking applications and delivery initiatives supporting our Cards, Deposits, Mortgage and Specialized Lending businesses.

This is a pivotal leadership role for someone who thrives on driving cultural change, building high-performing teams, and delivering innovative solutions. You will be responsible for shaping the engineering culture—modeling modern practices, fostering technical excellence, and inspiring teams to build like top-tier digital bank.

Position Responsibilities:  

• Own the engineering strategy for omnichannel capabilities, ensuring tight integration across mobile, online banking, and customer servicing systems.
• Drive execution of strategic omnichannel initiatives aligned to customer experience, revenue growth, and operational efficiency, while managing delivery timelines, dependencies, and risks.
• Analyze customer behavior, journey data, and system performance to find opportunities for optimization, innovation, and continuous improvement across the end-to-end customer lifecycle.
• Lead and scale multi-disciplinary engineering teams across mobile and online/web channels supporting digital servicing and lending, to deliver seamless omnichannel customer experiences across digital and physical touchpoints.
• Champion a modern engineering culture rooted in innovation, accountability, and continuous improvement—drawing inspiration from leading tech organizations
• Drive delivery of pivotal initiatives across retail banking, mortgage and specialized lending, ensuring alignment with business outcomes and customer needs.
• Serve as a hands-on technical leader, guiding architectural decisions, evaluating emerging technologies, and ensuring engineering rigor, scalability, performance, and cost efficiency across all omnichannel platforms.
• Partner closely with Business product, Delivery, Architecture (Bank, Segment), and enterprise teams to translate customer and business needs into scalable, secure, and high-performing omnichannel solutions.
• Own production reliability, technical debt management, and CI/CD pipelines, ensuring high availability, resilience, and rapid, high-quality software delivery across all channels.
• Mentor and develop engineering leaders and talent, building hard-working teams with a strong focus on learning, growth, and succession planning.
• Know the latest omnichannel, retail, and digital commerce trends and guidelines, translating insights into actionable improvements and measurable business impact.

Required Qualifications:

• Proven experience leading engineering teams in banking or financial services, ideally with exposure to digital channels and lending platforms.
• 10+ years of progressive leadership in software engineering, including experience managing managers and senior technical contributors.
• Deep expertise in modern engineering practices—cloud-native development, CI/CD, DevOps, test automation, and agile delivery.
• Demonstrated success in driving engineering culture transformation within complex organizations.
• Passion for innovation and experimentation, with a strong understanding of how emerging technologies (e.g., generative AI, edge computing) can be applied to solve business problems.
• Strong technical acumen—able to engage in architectural discussions, challenge assumptions, and guide teams toward scalable solutions.
• Exceptional communication and stakeholder management skills, with the ability to influence across AVP+ levels.
• A growth mindset, resilience in the face of ambiguity, and a bias toward action.

Preferred Qualifications:

Strategic & Leadership Technical Skills

• Technical Roadmap Development: Translating business goals (e.g., "Buy Online, Pick Up In-Store") into actionable, phased technical roadmaps.
• Vendor Management & Evaluation: Assessing and integrating third-party SaaS solutions and technologies.
• Performance Metrics & Monitoring: Implementing observability tools (e.g., Datadog, Splunk) to monitor system health across the entire omnichannel stack.
• AI/ML Application: Understanding how to apply machine learning for personalization, search, and demand forecasting.

Technical Expertise

• Deep expertise in Java-based enterprise systems, including microservices architectures
• Strong experience designing and consuming RESTful APIs
• Working knowledge of modern JVM-based languages, including Apache Groovy
• Experience building and supporting batch processing solutions

Platforms, Data & Cloud

• Advanced experience operating and supporting applications on Linux-based platforms
• Strong understanding of relational database technologies and SQL
• Hands-on experience designing and deploying cloud-based solutions in Azure and/or AWS environments

Agile Delivery & Ways of Working

• Proven leadership in Agile delivery environments, driving predictable outcomes and continuous improvement
• Experience bringing to bear JIRA and Confluence to support planning, delivery transparency, and documentation

DevOps, CI/CD & Automation

• Confirmed experience leading teams that implement and maintain CI/CD pipelines
• Strong working knowledge of modern DevOps tools and practices, including:
• Azure DevOps (ADO) and Jenkins
• Git-based source control (GitHub and/or Bitbucket)
• Containerization using Docker
• Experience embedding automation and quality controls throughout the SDLC

Modern Engineering Tooling

• Familiarity with industry-standard tools for:
• Code quality and security (e.g., SonarQube)
• Artifact and dependency management (Nexus, Artifactory)
• Build and automation tools (Maven, Ant)
• Shell scripting for automation and operational efficiency

Salesforce Engineering (Asset)

• Experience working with Salesforce CLI tooling (mdapi, source, data, SFDX) within enterprise delivery environments

Business Enablement & Productivity

• Proficiency with Microsoft Office for executive-level communication and reporting
• Experience producing technical diagrams and documentation using MS Visio
• Understanding of project planning and dependency management using MS Project

When you join our team: 

• We’ll empower you to learn and grow the career you want.  
• We’ll recognize and support you in a flexible environment where well-being and inclusion are more than just words.  
• As part of our distributed team, we’ll support you in shaping the future you want to see.  

About Manulife and John Hancock

Manulife Financial Corporation is a leading international financial services provider, helping people make their decisions easier and lives better. To learn more about us, visit https://www.manulife.com/en/about/our-story.html.

Manulife is an Equal Opportunity Employer

At Manulife/John Hancock, we embrace our diversity. We strive to attract, develop and retain a workforce that is as diverse as the customers we serve and to foster an inclusive work environment that embraces the strength of cultures and individuals. We are committed to fair recruitment, retention, advancement and compensation, and we administer all of our practices and programs without discrimination on the basis of race, ancestry, place of origin, colour, ethnic origin, citizenship, religion or religious beliefs, creed, sex (including pregnancy and pregnancy-related conditions), sexual orientation, genetic characteristics, veteran status, gender identity, gender expression, age, marital status, family status, disability, or any other ground protected by applicable law.

It is our priority to remove barriers to provide equal access to employment. A Human Resources representative will work with applicants who request a reasonable accommodation during the application process. All information shared during the accommodation request process will be stored and used in a manner that is consistent with applicable laws and Manulife/John Hancock policies. To request a reasonable accommodation in the application process, contact [email protected].

Referenced Salary Location

Salary range is expected to be between

If you are applying for this role outside of the primary location, please contact [email protected] for the salary range for your location. The actual salary will vary depending on local market conditions, geography and relevant job-related factors such as knowledge, skills, qualifications, experience, and education/training. Employees also have the opportunity to participate in incentive programs and earn incentive compensation tied to business and individual performance.

Manulife offers eligible employees a wide array of customizable benefits, including health, dental, mental health, vision, short- and long-term disability, life and AD&D insurance coverage, adoption/surrogacy and wellness benefits, and employee/family assistance plans. We also offer eligible employees various retirement savings plans (including pension and a global share ownership plan with employer matching contributions) and financial education and counseling resources. Our generous paid time off program in Canada includes holidays, vacation, personal, and sick days, and we offer the full range of statutory leaves of absence. If you are applying for this role in the U.S., please contact [email protected] for more information about U.S.-specific paid time off provisions.