VP, Cloud Engineering & SRE

Candescent is the largest non-core digital banking provider. We bring together the transformative technologies that power and connect account opening, digital banking and branch solutions for banks and credit unions of all sizes on any core. Our Candescent solutions power the top three U.S. mobile banking apps and are trusted by banks and credit unions of all sizes.

We offer an extensive portfolio of industry-leading products and services with an extensible ecosystem of out-of-the-box and integrated partner solutions. In addition, our API-first architecture and developer tools enable financial institutions to optimize and expand upon their existing capabilities by seamlessly integrating custom-built or third-party solutions. And our connected in-person, remote and digital experiences reinvent customer service across all channels.

Self-service configuration and marketing tools give financial institutions greater control of their branding, targeted messaging and overall user experience. And data-driven analytics and reporting tools provide valuable insights to help drive continued growth and profitability. From conversions and implementations to custom development and customer care, our clients get expert, end-to-end support at every step.

Vice President, Cloud Engineering & SRE

Location: Atlanta, GA or San Ramon, CA), Waterloo, Canada are preferred locations. (Remote locations in US can be considered for exceptional candidates)

Reports to: Chief Technology Officer

Role Summary

Candescent, a leading Digital Banking SaaS platform, is seeking a hands-on, deeply technical, and execution-focused Vice President of Cloud Engineering & SRE to run and evolve our global infrastructure footprint across GCP and AWS. This leader will be responsible for delivering highly available, scalable, and secure systems with operational excellence and modern DevOps practices.

This role oversees Cloud Infrastructure, Site Reliability Engineering, DevOps Center of Excellence, Database Engineering, Performance Engineering, and Internal Developer Tools — all with a strong focus on automation, resilience, and developer velocity.

This leader will oversee business-critical systems that power the digital banking experience for numerous financial institutions, including managing platform partner integrations and driving a platform extensibility ecosystem essential to real-time money movement, transaction processing, and digital engagement.

Key Responsibilities

• Define and lead the reliability and cloud infrastructure strategy aligned with business and product goals.
• Build and scale a high-performing global team of SREs, platform engineers, and infrastructure specialists.
• Foster a “you build it, you run it” culture focused on operational excellence and innovation.
• Represent the function in executive forums and lead customer-facing technical escalations.
• Partner closely with engineering leadership and architecture to drive scalable, modern platform solutions.

Platform & Infrastructure

• Architect and operate secure, resilient, and scalable cloud infrastructure across GCP and AWS.
• Lead the adoption of Kubernetes, containers, service mesh, and infrastructure as code (Terraform).
• Drive CI/CD automation, golden paths, and internal tooling to accelerate developer velocity and platform extensibility.
• Oversee capacity planning, performance engineering, and modernization of database platforms (Oracle, SQL Server, Informix) to Postgres and other Cloud native services.

Operational Excellence & Reliability

• Own and govern SLAs, SLOs, and SLIs for all business-critical services.
• Lead incident management, including prevention, rapid response, postmortems, and root cause analysis.
• Champion observability practices (monitoring, alerting, tracing) to ensure availability and disaster recovery readiness.
• Continuously reduce operational toil and improve key metrics (MTTR, uptime, incident frequency).

Security, Compliance & Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Ensure secure operations and compliance with industry standards (SOC2, ISO27001) in collaboration with security teams.
• Work across Product, Security, Engineering, and Customer Success to integrate reliability into the development lifecycle.
• Advocate for SRE and DevOps best practices to elevate engineering maturity across the organization.

Required Qualifications

• 15+ years in engineering or infrastructure leadership with deep expertise in SRE, DevOps, or Cloud Operations.
• Proven success managing production workloads on public clouds (GCP and AWS).
• Deep expertise in Kubernetes, IaC tools (e.g., Terraform), and Service Mesh architecture.
• Strong command of SRE practices: SLOs, SLIs, incident response, chaos engineering.
• Experience building robust CI/CD platforms and developer self-service tools.
• Track record of scaling and mentoring high-performing global teams.

Preferred Experience

• Digital Banking or FinTech domain experience, particularly in regulated environments.
• Strong understanding of security, compliance, and operational risk frameworks.
• Experience managing hybrid environments and transitioning from legacy to cloud-native platforms.

Required Qualifications

• 15+ years in engineering and infrastructure leadership with deep background in SRE, DevOps, or Cloud Operations.
• Proven success running production workloads and mission-critical platforms on public clouds (GCP, AWS).
• Deep expertise in Kubernetes, Infrastructure as a Code (Terraform), and Service Mesh architecture.
• Strong understanding of SRE practices: SLOs, SLIs, error budgets, incident management, chaos engineering.
• Experience implementing robust CI/CD systems, developer platforms, and automation frameworks.
• Track record building and scaling high-performing teams across geographies.

Preferred Experience

• Digital Banking or FinTech domain experience, especially in regulated environments.
• Strong familiarity with security, compliance, and operational risk frameworks.

Why Join Us?

At Candescent, we are reimagining the future of banking through technology. This role is instrumental in laying the foundation for our next-generation platform – one that is cloud-native, developer-friendly, and engineered for scale and reliability.

Offers of employment are conditional upon passage of screening criteria applicable to the job.

EEO Statement

Integrated into our shared values is Candescent’s commitment to diversity and equal employment opportunity. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to sex, age, race, color, creed, religion, national origin, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity, veteran status, military service, genetic information, or any other characteristic or conduct protected by law. Candescent is committed to being a globally inclusive company where all people are treated fairly, recognized for their individuality, promoted based on performance, and encouraged to strive to reach their full potential.  We believe in understanding and respecting differences among all people. Every individual at Candescent has an ongoing responsibility to respect and support a globally diverse environment.

Statement to Third Party Agencies
To ALL recruitment agencies: Candescent only accepts resumes from agencies on the preferred supplier list. Please do not forward resumes to our applicant tracking system, Candescent employees, or any Candescent facility. Candescent is not responsible for any fees or charges associated with unsolicited resumes.