Director, Developer Experience & Automation

Location: Toronto, Canada

Time Type: Full time

Job Description

The opportunity

The Director, Developer Experience & Automation is a high‑impact opportunity to shape enterprise‑level technology outcomes by owning the DevSecOps, environment automation, and AI capabilities that power the entire SDLC across Business Technology. As a senior leader within the Platform Engineering division, you will set strategic direction, drive modern engineering practices, and align Product Enablement teams to elevate efficiency and accelerate value delivery. You’ll provide enterprise thought leadership in cloud‑native architecture, automated delivery pipelines, scalable self‑service platforms, and pragmatic AI adoption—while collaborating closely with Business Technology and Technology Services to engineer secure, scalable, and future‑ready platform capabilities. This role offers a rare level of influence across the Technology division, ensuring platform strategy is modern, cohesive, and delivers meaningful impact.

Who you'll work with

Reporting to the Managing Director, Platform Engineering, this role works closely with senior leadership across Business Technology and Technology Services to shape and execute the enterprise platform engineering strategy—spanning DevSecOps, IaC, and AI‑augmented SDLC practices. The Director partners with Product Enablement teams and Platform Enablement to design secure, scalable, self‑service platform capabilities and ensure operational readiness and adoption. With influence that reaches across the Technology division, this leader collaborates broadly to ensure the platform strategy is modern, cohesive, and value‑driven.

What you'll do

• Working with senior management in Business Technology groups to contribute to and execute the enterprise-wide platform engineering strategy and roadmap including DevSecOps, IAC, CI/CD and AI-augmented SDLC.
• Establish and govern an enterprise-wide Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipeline model to support a highly agile organization in a cost-effective and scalable manner.
• Define the vision, prioritize investment, and oversee adoption of AI capabilities across every stage of the SDLC (requirements → code → test → deploy → operate) to increase delivery speed and efficiency.
• Provide oversight for the design standards and engineering integrity of the enterprise platform services catalogue, partnering with Platform Enablement for lifecycle management, adoption, and operations.
• Enable Business Technology leadership by setting direction and ensuring delivery of Technology Infrastructure Environments (IaC) and CI/CD capabilities in a manner that is highly flexible, highly adaptable and fully aligned to the evolving needs of these teams.
• This role provides thought leadership, strategic thinking, and oversight to ensure platform engineering and AI enabled SDLC capabilities deliver measurable outcomes across the Technology Division.
• Provides leadership and direction to internal team of full-time employees and third-party partners to execute the ‘Developer Experience into the annual and three-year Technology plans, ensuring workforce and investment alignment with strategic priorities.
• Collaborate with Platform Enablement and Product Enablement leaders to transition platform capabilities into sustainable support models, ensuring operational readiness prior to enterprise adoption.

What you'll need

• 10+ years of experience in information technology.
• Minimum of 7years managing and/or leading technology teams.
• 7 years of experience in a platform engineering or similar role, including designing and implementing large complex technology projects.
• 7 years of experience in managing vendor relationships at a management level.
• At least 5 years’ experience managing technology budgets.
• Expert understanding of DevSecOps, AI enablement and automation practices and approaches.
• Excellent capability to negotiate, influence without authority, make recommendations, facilitate decisions, lead technical staff and organize work as it relates to technology up to the Executive level within OTPP.
• Excellent verbal and written communication capability demonstrated at technical professional and customer/stakeholder levels.
• Excellent critical thinking and problem-solving skills, planning and organizing and organizational change disciplines.
• Strong ability to synthesize infrastructure demands of varying complexity into achievable delivery plans with a high degree of success in meeting or exceeding timing and quality commitments.
• Demonstrated ability to lead and develop technical professionals.
• Excellent understanding of solutions and technologies supporting the current and future needs of these customers.
• Strong understanding of infrastructure technology solutions and vendor products across multiple solution domains e.g. servers, networking, storage, applications, middleware, database etc.
• Strong knowledge and understanding of Agile, Project Management, ITIL, ITSM and SDLC methodologies and processes.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Business Studies, IT or equivalent experience is required.
• Working knowledge of the Financial and Pension Services Industry is an asset.

What we’re offering

• Numerous opportunities for professional growth and development

• Comprehensive employer paid benefits coverage

• Retirement income through a defined benefit pension plan

• The opportunity to invest back into the fund through our Deferred Incentive Program

• A flexible work environment combining in office collaboration and remote working

• Competitive time off

• Our Flexible Travel Program gives you the option to work abroad in another region/country for up to a month each year

• Employee discount programs including Edvantage and Perkopolis

At Ontario Teachers', diversity is one of our core strengths. We take pride in ensuring that the people we hire and the culture we create, reflect and embrace diversity of thought, background and experience. Through our Diversity, Equity and Inclusion strategy and our Employee Resource Groups (ERGs), we celebrate diversity and foster inclusion through events for colleagues to connect for professional development, networking & mentoring.  We are building an inclusive and equitable workplace where our talent is respected, accepted and empowered to be themselves.  To learn more about our commitment to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, check out Life at Teachers'.

How to apply

Are you ready to pursue new challenges and take your career to the next level? Apply today! You may be invited to complete a pre-recorded digital interview as part of your application.

Accommodations are available upon request ([email protected]) for candidates with a disability taking part in the recruitment process and once hired.

Candidates must be legally entitled to work in the country where this role is located.

Ontario Teachers’ may use AI-based tools to assist in screening and assessing applicants for this position. These tools may help us identify candidates whose skills and experience align with Ontario Teachers’ objectives by analyzing information provided in resumes and applications. Our use of AI does not replace human decision-making.

To learn more about how Teachers’ uses AI with your personal information, please visit our Privacy Centre. 

Functional Areas:

Vacancy:

Current