Director, Engineering Lead, In-House Accelerator

Posted 2 weeks ago

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About the role

  • Engineering Lead for Sun Life's innovative in-house accelerator, building and scaling digital products in a startup-style environment. Overseeing hands-on technical execution and mentoring a growing engineering team.

Responsibilities

  • Write production-quality code daily across backend, APIs, and AI-enabled services
  • Make fast, pragmatic architecture decisions that prioritize learning and delivery while keeping future scale in mind
  • Design and evolve Sun Life’s agentic AI platform, including orchestration, integration layers, APIs, and guardrails
  • Evaluate and experiment with new technologies, AI models, and vendor solutions
  • Hire, onboard, mentor, and develop a small, high-caliber engineering team (AI, backend, full-stack)
  • Establish engineering practices, standards, and ways of working that enable speed without sacrificing quality
  • Foster a culture of experimentation, ownership, and continuous learning
  • Build with security, reliability, and compliance awareness appropriate for a regulated financial institution.
  • Understand which enterprise guardrails matter now vs. later, and navigate governance without slowing experimentation.

Requirements

  • 10+ years of hands-on engineering experience, with recent, demonstrable coding work in a 0 - 1 environment.
  • Experience acting as a software engineering leader or founder-level engineer on complex digital products or platforms.
  • Strong fluency in modern cloud architecture (AWS, Azure, or GCP) and DevOps practices (CI/CD, containers, infrastructure as code).
  • Proven ability to operate in ambiguity, make trade-offs, and ship imperfect solutions quickly.
  • Ability to grow from individual contributor to team builder—comfortable hiring, mentoring, and raising the bar for others.
  • Startup or early-stage product experience is a significant asset.
  • Nice to have: Experience with AI/ML systems → building with LLMs, prompt engineering, or agentic architectures.

Benefits

  • Great Place to Work® Certified for Most Trusted Executive Team in Canada – 2025, 2024 and 2023
  • Great Place to Work® Certified for Best Workplaces in Canada - 2025
  • Canada Order of Excellence for Mental Health at Work® certification from Excellence Canada.
  • Top Work Places® for Remote Work – Monster Canada - 2024
  • Flexible hybrid work model.
  • Pension, stock and savings programs to help build and enhance your future financial security
  • Work and professional development that is united by our Purpose: to help Clients and Employees achieve lifetime financial security and live healthier lives
  • A friendly, collaborative and inclusive culture.
  • Be part of our continuous improvement journey in developing the next greatest digital enterprise experience.

Job type

Full Time

Experience level

Senior

Salary

CA$110,000 - CA$180,000 per year

Degree requirement

Bachelor's Degree

Tech skills

AWSAzureCloudGoogle Cloud Platform

Location requirements

HybridWaterlooCanada

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