# Software Development Manager, Institutional Transfers
**Company:** [Wealthsimple Technologies](https://scaleengineer.com/companies/wealthsimple)
Lead and grow a high-performing engineering team at Wealthsimple, managing the Transfers Platform or Transfers Experience team while shaping technical direction for scalable, reliable financial systems. This role combines hands-on engineering leadership with strategic oversight of infrastructure powering thousands of daily account transfers across Canada's leading fintech platform serving over 4 million users and managing over $155 billion in assets under administration.
**Role:** Engineering Manager
**Seniority:** Manager
**Locations:** Remote (Canada)
**Remote:** yes
**Salary:** 166400–208000 CAD
[Apply](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/wealthsimple/3fe022c3-dc9c-4b6e-87d8-56f65b7accce)
Canonical: https://scaleengineer.com/jobs/wealthsimple/software-development-manager-institutional-transfers
---
## Responsibilities

- Team Building and Development: Build and grow a high-performing, inclusive engineering team through strategic hiring, personalized coaching, constructive feedback, career development planning, and thoughtful performance management aligned with company values.
- Technical Strategy and Roadmapping: Set clear technical direction and roadmaps in partnership with Product and Design teams, balancing new feature capabilities with critical investments in platform reliability, maintainability, observability, and developer effectiveness.
- Platform Scalability and Reliability: Ensure the transfer platform and operational tooling maintain high availability and performance standards, supporting thousands of account transfers daily while managing distributed systems complexity and financial transaction criticality.
- Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner with Operations, Customer Experience, Bank and Brokerage Linking, Infrastructure, Security, and SRE teams to resolve dependencies, automate manual workflows, and deliver end-to-end outcomes that improve transfer accuracy, transparency, and speed.
- Product Development Leadership: Guide the team in developing new capabilities that expand client account transfer options, operating in data-driven environments to iterate quickly based on user behavior, system performance, and business metrics.
- Engineering Excellence Standards: Champion strong engineering practices including thoughtful system design, rigorous code review processes, comprehensive testing strategies, production observability, clear documentation, healthy on-call rotations, and effective incident response protocols.
- Modern Development Practices: Promote adoption of AI-first development tools and contemporary engineering practices to materially improve team velocity, code quality, and operational efficiency while staying current with industry best practices and standards.
- Reporting and Strategic Input: Report to the Engineering Director, contribute to the broader engineering leadership community, participate in architectural and strategic decisions, and help establish cultural foundations for newly formed teams with significant business and client impact.

## Requirements

### education

- {"name":"Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or Related Field","description":"Formal education in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Computer Engineering, or equivalent practical experience demonstrating foundational software engineering knowledge and problem-solving skills."}

### technical

- {"name":"Production Software Development","description":"Deep technical expertise in production-grade software development with demonstrated ability to architect and guide implementation decisions across backend, frontend, and distributed systems."}
- {"name":"Distributed Systems Architecture","description":"Solid understanding of distributed systems patterns, trade-offs, and operational considerations required to build reliable, scalable financial infrastructure handling concurrent transactions at scale."}
- {"name":"Backend Systems","description":"Practical experience designing and maintaining modern backend systems, including RESTful and GraphQL APIs, microservices architectures, and event-driven patterns for processing financial transactions."}
- {"name":"Database Systems","description":"Demonstrated proficiency with relational databases (SQL), including schema design, query optimization, transaction management, and data consistency patterns critical for financial applications."}
- {"name":"Cloud Infrastructure","description":"Hands-on experience with cloud platforms and deployment infrastructure, understanding containerization, orchestration, monitoring, logging, and infrastructure-as-code principles in production environments."}
- {"name":"Frontend Technologies","description":"Practical understanding of modern frontend frameworks and principles, enabling informed decisions about user experience, API contracts, and cross-functional engineering challenges."}

### experience

- {"name":"Engineering Team Leadership","description":"Proven experience managing and developing software engineering teams, including recruiting talented engineers, conducting effective one-on-ones, providing constructive feedback, career development mentoring, and making performance decisions."}
- {"name":"Regulated or Complex Product Development","description":"Track record delivering reliable products in complex or regulated environments with multiple stakeholders, demonstrating ability to balance compliance requirements with engineering best practices and time-to-market pressures."}
- {"name":"Cross-Functional Engineering Leadership","description":"Success leading engineering efforts that span multiple teams, managing dependencies with product, design, operations, security, and infrastructure organizations to deliver coordinated outcomes."}
- {"name":"Stakeholder Communication","description":"Demonstrated effectiveness communicating complex technical concepts to both software engineers and non-technical business stakeholders, translating between technical constraints and business objectives."}
- {"name":"Operational Excellence","description":"Experience building cultures of operational excellence, including establishing monitoring practices, on-call processes, incident response protocols, and continuous improvement methodologies in production environments."}

## Skills

### required

- {"name":"Engineering Team Management","description":"Ability to hire, mentor, and develop engineering talent; provide meaningful feedback; and manage performance conversations aligned with organizational values and growth objectives."}
- {"name":"System Architecture and Design","description":"Technical judgment to guide architectural decisions, evaluate trade-offs between performance, scalability, maintainability, and reliability in complex systems."}
- {"name":"Production Operations","description":"Deep understanding of production systems management including monitoring, alerting, logging, incident response, and on-call operations in mission-critical environments."}
- {"name":"Cross-Functional Leadership","description":"Ability to align and collaborate across Product, Design, Operations, Security, and Infrastructure teams to resolve technical dependencies and deliver coordinated outcomes."}
- {"name":"Data-Driven Decision Making","description":"Experience using metrics, analytics, and observability data to inform technical decisions, identify bottlenecks, and measure impact of engineering initiatives."}
- {"name":"Inclusive Leadership","description":"Commitment to building diverse, equitable, and inclusive teams; fostering psychological safety; and creating environments where all engineers can contribute and grow."}

### preferred

- {"name":"Ruby on Rails","description":"Experience building production systems with Rails, understanding its conventions, patterns, and ecosystem for rapid application development in fintech contexts."}
- {"name":"React and React Native","description":"Hands-on experience with React for web applications or React Native for mobile development, understanding component patterns and state management in modern JavaScript applications."}
- {"name":"GraphQL","description":"Practical experience designing and implementing GraphQL APIs, understanding queries, mutations, subscriptions, and GraphQL tooling for efficient client-server communication."}
- {"name":"Event-Driven Architectures","description":"Experience with technologies like Kafka for building scalable, event-driven systems and understanding patterns for event sourcing, CQRS, and asynchronous processing."}
- {"name":"Temporal Workflows","description":"Familiarity with Temporal or similar workflow orchestration platforms for managing complex, long-running, distributed business processes in financial applications."}
- {"name":"Kubernetes and Container Orchestration","description":"Experience deploying and managing containerized applications with Kubernetes, understanding pods, services, deployments, and cloud-native operational patterns."}
- {"name":"AWS Cloud Services","description":"Hands-on experience with Amazon Web Services including EC2, RDS, S3, Lambda, and other managed services commonly used in scalable fintech infrastructure."}
- {"name":"Observability Platforms","description":"Expertise with Datadog, Sentry, or similar observability platforms for distributed tracing, performance monitoring, error tracking, and infrastructure visibility in production systems."}
- {"name":"Fintech Domain Knowledge","description":"Prior experience in fintech, banking, brokerage, or similar industries handling sensitive financial data, understanding compliance requirements, settlement processes, and financial workflows."}
- {"name":"Institutional Transfer Rails","description":"Familiarity with financial transfer infrastructure including ATON (Automated Transfer of Assets to Online and Digital Service) or Fundserv platforms used for Canadian account transfers."}
- {"name":"Additional Languages","description":"Experience with Java, Kotlin, or Python for backend services, or mobile development expertise complementing core technology stack knowledge."}

## Tech stack

### tools

- {"name":"AWS","description":"Cloud infrastructure platform hosting Wealthsimple's systems, providing compute, storage, database, and managed services for scalable operations."}
- {"name":"Kafka","description":"Distributed event streaming platform for building event-driven architectures, enabling asynchronous transfer processing and system communication."}
- {"name":"Kubernetes","description":"Container orchestration platform for managing containerized microservices, ensuring reliable deployment and scaling of transfer platform components."}
- {"name":"Datadog","description":"Observability platform providing monitoring, logging, tracing, and alerting across the Institutional Transfers infrastructure and services."}
- {"name":"Sentry","description":"Error tracking and performance monitoring platform for identifying and resolving issues in production transfer systems and applications."}
- {"name":"Docker","description":"Container technology enabling consistent deployment of microservices across development, staging, and production environments."}

### others

- {"name":"Temporal","description":"Workflow orchestration platform for managing complex, durable, and long-running business processes in institutional transfer workflows."}
- {"name":"ATON","description":"Canadian institutional transfer rail enabling automated movement of investment accounts between financial institutions and custodians."}
- {"name":"Fundserv","description":"Canadian fund data and settlement infrastructure used for managing mutual fund transfers and account movements in the Wealthsimple ecosystem."}
- {"name":"AI-First Development Tools","description":"Modern development assistance tools leveraging artificial intelligence to improve code generation, testing, documentation, and developer productivity."}

### databases

- {"name":"PostgreSQL","description":"Primary relational database system for storing financial transaction data, account information, and transfer state with ACID compliance and reliability."}
- {"name":"Redis","description":"In-memory data store used for caching, session management, and real-time data processing in high-throughput transfer scenarios."}

### languages

- {"name":"Ruby","description":"Primary backend language for Wealthsimple's core systems, used extensively with Rails framework for building scalable financial applications."}
- {"name":"JavaScript/TypeScript","description":"Used across frontend applications and React-based systems for building responsive user interfaces and interactive transfer experiences."}
- {"name":"Python","description":"Leveraged for data analysis, automation scripts, and backend services in the Institutional Transfers infrastructure."}
- {"name":"Java/Kotlin","description":"Used in certain backend services and distributed systems for high-performance transaction processing and financial workflows."}

### frameworks

- {"name":"Ruby on Rails","description":"Core framework powering Wealthsimple's backend services, providing rapid development, convention-over-configuration patterns, and integrated testing capabilities."}
- {"name":"React","description":"Frontend framework for building the user-facing transfer experience, managing complex state and providing responsive interfaces for account management."}
- {"name":"React Native","description":"Used for mobile applications to provide iOS and Android experiences, enabling code sharing across mobile platforms for transfer workflows."}
- {"name":"GraphQL","description":"API query language and runtime for efficient communication between frontend and backend systems, particularly for complex financial data queries."}

## Benefits

### benefits

- {"name":"Comprehensive Health Benefits","description":"Top-tier health insurance coverage including medical, dental, and vision care, along with life insurance benefits to protect you and your family."}
- {"name":"Registered Retirement Savings Plan","description":"Long-term group savings plan with employer matching contributions through Wealthsimple for Business, helping you build retirement security."}
- {"name":"Generous Time Off","description":"20 vacation days annually, 4 dedicated wellness days for personal development and recharge, unlimited paid sick days, and unlimited mental health days to support your wellbeing."}
- {"name":"International Work Flexibility","description":"90 days away program allowing you to work remotely from outside Canada up to 90 days per year, providing flexibility for digital nomad lifestyle or international travels."}
- {"name":"Employee Resource Groups","description":"Community-driven affinity groups including Rainbow (2SLGBTQ+ support), Women of Wealthsimple, and Black at Wealthsimple providing networking, advocacy, and inclusive spaces."}
- {"name":"Hybrid Work Arrangement","description":"Flexible hybrid work model with office locations across North America, allowing balance between collaborative in-office time and remote productivity."}
- {"name":"Equity Compensation","description":"Stock options or equity grants providing ownership stake in Wealthsimple's future growth and success as a leading fintech innovator."}

## Compensation

- **max:** 220000
- **min:** 150000
- **currency:** CAD
- **stockOptions:** true

## Interview process

### steps

## Full description
## **Build something people love**

Wealthsimple is Canada’s leading financial innovator. The company offers a full suite of simple, sophisticated financial products across managed investing, do-it-yourself trading, cryptocurrency, tax filing, spending and saving. Wealthsimple currently serves more than 4 million Canadians and holds over $155 billion in assets under administration. The company was founded in 2014 by a team of financial experts and technology entrepreneurs, and is headquartered in Toronto, Canada.

We're proud of what we've built — and we're just getting started. Read our [Culture Manual](https://www.wealthsimple.com/en-ca/culture) and learn more about [how we work](https://www.wealthsimple.com/en-ca/careers).

## **About Institutional Transfers**

We're the team that makes it effortless for clients to move their investments to and from Wealthsimple. Behind every account transfer is a complex network of institutions, systems, and people — and our job is to make that all feel simple. We power the platform that ensures money moves reliably, efficiently, and transparently for our clients, and we're always growing our product offering so clients can transfer more accounts, in more ways and easier than ever.

We're hiring an Engineering Manager to lead one of our two teams. **Transfers Platform** owns the foundations that make transfers scalable and observable, including workflow architecture, operational tooling, and automation. **Transfers Experience** focuses on expanding our product offering so clients can move all types of accounts to Wealthsimple. Both teams partner closely with Product, Design, Operations, CX, and other Engineering teams.

## **About the Role**

As an Engineering Manager, you'll lead a team of software developers while helping shape the technical direction, delivery strategy, and culture of Institutional Transfers. You'll balance near-term client and operational impact with long-term investments in reliability, scalability, and developer effectiveness. Reporting to an Engineering Director, you'll contribute to the broader engineering leadership community and help build systems that support thousands of account transfers each day. You'll also have the opportunity to help shape newly formed teams with significant business and client impact.

## **In this role you'll have the opportunity to:**

* Build and grow a high-performing, inclusive team through hiring, coaching, feedback, career development, and thoughtful performance management.
* Set a clear technical direction and roadmap with Product and Design, balancing new capabilities with reliability, maintainability, and operational health.
* Ensure the scalability and reliability of the transfer platform and the tools that support our operations teams.
* Partner with Operations and CX to automate manual work — through both traditional software and modern technologies — and improve the accuracy, transparency, and speed of transfer processes.
* Help your team build new ways for clients to move their accounts to Wealthsimple, operating in data-driven environments and using that data to iterate quickly.
* Promote strong engineering practices, including thoughtful design, code review, testing, observability, documentation, healthy on-call, and effective incident response.
* Champion the use of AI-first development tools to materially improve your team's output.
* Work across Institutional Transfers, Bank and Brokerage Linking, Infrastructure, Security, SRE, and other teams to resolve dependencies and deliver end-to-end outcomes.
* Keep on top of industry best practices and standards that benefit our engineering organization, and hold teams accountable to them.

## **What you'll bring:**

* Experience managing and developing software engineering teams, including hiring, mentoring, feedback, and performance management.
* Technical depth in production software development and distributed systems, with the judgment to guide architecture and implementation decisions.
* Experience delivering reliable products with cross-functional partners in a complex or regulated environment.
* A practical understanding of modern backend and frontend systems, relational databases (SQL), event-driven architectures, and cloud infrastructure.
* Effectiveness at communicating with both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
* A strong commitment to inclusive leadership, operational excellence, and continuous improvement — including improving team documentation and making meaningful improvements to the codebase.
* Comfort supporting a team through on-call duties and system maintenance.

## **Nice to haves:**

* Experience with Ruby on Rails, React or React Native, GraphQL, Kafka, Temporal, Kubernetes, AWS, Datadog, or Sentry.
* Experience with Java, Kotlin, Python, or mobile development.
* Experience in fintech, banking, brokerage, or other systems that handle sensitive financial data.
* Familiarity with institutional transfer rails such as ATON or Fundserv.

## **What success looks like**

In your first six months, you'll have built strong relationships with your team and partners, established clear goals and development plans, understood the health of the team's systems and operations, and helped shape a roadmap that improves reliability, delivery, and the client or operational experience.

## **Why Wealthsimple?**

🌸 Top-tier health benefits and life insurance

📈 Long-term group savings with employer match, through Wealthsimple for Business

🌴 20 vacation days, 4 wellness days, and unlimited sick and mental health days per year\*

✈️ 90 days away: work outside Canada for up to 90 days per year\*

👥 Employee resource groups, including Rainbow (2SLGBTQ), Women of WS, and Black at WS

🌎 We are a hybrid team with over 1,500 employees across North America. The people are one of the best parts of working here: you'll collaborate with incredibly talented, curious, and driven teammates who are deeply committed to doing great work.  
  
\*Unlimited paid sick days, Wellness Days and the 90 day away program do not apply to certain roles. 

## **ICYMI**

**Technology & Innovation at Wealthsimple:** We move quickly and build thoughtfully. That means we're always looking for better ways to work — whether that's new tools, AI, or rethinking how we approach a problem. We don't expect you to have all the answers, but we do expect curiosity and a willingness to evolve alongside the products we're building.

**Inclusion Statement:** We're building products for a diverse world, and we need a diverse team to do it well. We strongly encourage applications from everyone, regardless of race, religion, colour, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, or disability status.

**Accessibility Statement:** We're committed to an accessible hiring experience. If you need any accommodations throughout the interview process, please let us know — we'll work with you to make sure you have what you need. We also welcome any feedback on how we can better accommodate candidates with accessibility needs.

**AI in Hiring:** We may use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support parts of our hiring process, such as reviewing applications, analyzing resumes, or assessing responses. These tools assist our team but don't replace human judgment – all final hiring decisions are made by people. If you have questions about how your data is used, reach out to us.