Associate Vice President, GFT Engineering

The Associate Vice President, Engineering – Shared Services is responsible for the end-to-end delivery of engineering solutions, development practices, and technological features built to support all Group Functions, including Actuarial, Finance, Risk Management, Compliance, Legal, HR, and other enterprise support functions!

This AVP leads engineering execution across multiple portfolios, ensuring solutions are secure, scalable, reusable, and aligned to enterprise architecture and platform strategy! The role oversees full stack developers, solution architects, DevOps engineers, and platform specialists, driving engineering excellence and consistency across all functions.

The role reports into the VP, Technology Strategy, Delivery, & Engineering and plays a pivotal part in shaping and maturing the enterprise engineering ecosystem. It combines strong technical authority with hands-on leadership, guiding teams in modern engineering methods, platform patterns, and cloud-native development.

Position Responsibilities:
Engineering Delivery & Technical Leadership

• Provide hands-on leadership of solution architecture, platform engineering, and full stack development across all Group Functions.
• Oversee the design and delivery of secure, performant, and modular solutions using cloud-native, event-driven, and API-first architectures.
• Lead code review practices, architectural oversight, and engineering governance to ensure quality, resilience, and maintainability.
• Drive adoption of common engineering patterns, frameworks, reusable services, and shared platforms across Finance, Actuarial, Risk, Compliance, HR, Legal, and Procurement.
• Partner with the PMO, Product Owners, and Architecture teams to align engineering execution with enterprise technology strategy and application roadmaps.
   

Modern Engineering Practices & Platform Commonalities

• Establish and maintain enterprise engineering standards: DevOps, CI/CD automation, SRE practices, test automation, monitoring, and secure-by-design frameworks.
• Build common platform capabilities that reduce duplication and accelerate delivery across Group Functions (e.g., shared data access layers, workflow engines, integration patterns, identity services).
• Champion developer experience (DevEx) and productivity tools, including automated pipelines, IaC, code scaffolding, and AI augmented development (e.g., GitHub Copilot).
   

Multi-functional Partner Alignment

• Serve as the primary point of contact for all engineering and development matters for Group Functions.
• Engage with senior business and technology leaders to translate functional requirements into scalable technical solutions.
• Influence multi-functional governance bodies and drive alignment across architecture, security, operations, and program delivery leadership.

Operational Excellence

• Maintain engineering and operational dashboards to baseline delivery performance, quality, productivity, and agility.
• Lead the solving and rapid resolution of complex architectural or system issues.
• Ensure platforms supporting Group Functions remain stable, resilient, and aligned with enterprise operational requirements.

People Leadership

• Lead a team of full-time employees and contractors across architecture, engineering, DevOps, and delivery roles.
• Build career paths, development plans, and succession pipelines for technical talent.
• Promote cross-training and an engineering community of practice throughout Group Functions.
• Act as a coach and mentor, elevating the technical bar of architects, developers, and team leads.
• Attract, hire, and retain high-performing engineering talent with advanced cloud, DevOps, and platform engineering skills.

Required Qualifications:
Technical Skills

• 10–15 years of progressive experience in software engineering, solution architecture, cloud development, or platform engineering.
• Proven capability designing and implementing cloud-native systems using Azure, AWS, or GCP.
• Expertise with modern engineering toolchains and platforms:
• Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, ARM, CloudFormation)
• Container orchestration (Kubernetes)
• Event streaming (Kafka)
• CI/CD (GitHub Actions, Jenkins, Azure DevOps)
• Observability tools (Prometheus, Grafana, Splunk)
• Strong technical depth in APIs, microservices, distributed systems, integration patterns, and automated testing frameworks.
• Experience with enterprise SaaS integrations.
• Ability to evaluate and adopt emerging technologies, including generative AI accelerators, automated code remediation, and engineering productivity tooling.
• Solid understanding of financial, actuarial, risk, and compliance systems and their unique technical controls.

Non-Technical Skills

• Exceptional communication skills—able to simplify complex technical issues to business leaders.
• Strong relationship-building with senior partners.
• Ability to lead through ambiguity and influence teams outside direct line authority.
• High learning agility and the ability to ramp up quickly on new domains.
• Strong organizational skills with a track record of delivering large, complex multi-stakeholder programs.

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 building the future you want to see.

#LI-Hybrid

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 hr@manulife.com.

Referenced Salary Location

Toronto, OntarioHybrid

Salary range is expected to be between

$129,800.00 CAD - $241,200.00 CAD

Employees also have the opportunity to participate in incentive programs and earn incentive compensation tied to business and individual performance. 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. If you are applying for this role outside of the primary location, please contact hr@manulife.com for the salary range for your location.

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 hr@manulife.com for more information about U.S.-specific paid time off provisions.