Hybrid Director, Engineering Lead, In-House Accelerator

at Sun Life

• Job title: Director, Engineering Lead, In-House Accelerator
• Job type: Full Time
• Experience level: Senior
• Salary: CA$110,000 - CA$180,000 per year
• Degree requirement: Bachelor's Degree
• Tech skills: AWS, Azure, Cloud, Google Cloud Platform
• Location requirements: Hybrid, Waterloo, Canada

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.