Deputy Vice President and Technology Lead

You are as unique as your journey, your experience, and your perspective. Here, you will be encouraged, empowered, and challenged to be at your best. You will work with dynamic colleagues – experts in their fields – who are eager to share their knowledge with you. Your leaders will inspire and help you reach your potential and soar to new horizons. Every day, you will have new and exciting opportunities to make life brighter for our Clients – who are at the heart of everything we do.

At Sun Life, we are guided by our Purpose: to help our Clients achieve lifelong financial security and live a healthier life. Our values shape how we work: kindness, authenticity, boldness, inspiration, and impact.

When you join Sun Life, you work with passionate colleagues and enabling leaders who support your growth and celebrate your contributions, so you can make a significant difference in the lives of our Clients.

Discover how you can make a difference in the lives of people, families, and communities around the world.

Summary of Duties

As a strategic technology leader, you will oversee the activation, scalability, and modernization of Sun Life Canada's shared digital platforms to deliver secure, connected, and frictionless experiences for clients, advisors, and the mobile secure app, as well as related activation platforms such as Client and Client Identity and Access Management, and an internally designed system.

This role combines strategic leadership, technical oversight, personnel management, service delivery, operational responsibility, and vendor and finance management with a focus on technological excellence and added value. You will collaborate closely with leaders of the product, client experience, architecture, cybersecurity, operations, and engineering teams to ensure that digital assets are resilient, scalable, secure, reusable, and aligned with business priorities.

As this is a high-visibility environment where the reliability and modernization of digital platforms and inter-organizational work are essential to client outcomes, you will need to be able to bring clarity to a broad mandate, make decisions in ambiguity, and build a highly performing technological organization that balances speed, stability, security, and the long-term health of platforms.

Duties

• Technological Strategy, Platform Logistics Support, and Engineering
• Shape, communicate, and synchronize our digital strategy across divisions, considering short-term commitments and long-term modernization goals.
• Collaborate with leaders of the product, client experience, architecture, cybersecurity, operations, and enterprise technology teams to define platform roadmaps, key objectives and results, implementation order, and investment priorities.
• Provide informed leadership on the evolution of shared digital platforms, including identity management, data integration and activation, websites, and the mobile app, as well as the evolution of reusable digital capabilities.
• Promote technological stack standards and modern engineering practices, automation, and architectural excellence while making strategic choices between building internally, acquiring external solutions, or forming partnerships, all within a complex technological ecosystem.
• Consider reusability, scalability, security, maintainability, accessibility, and technical debt reduction in all design and engineering decisions.

Plan exceptional digital experiences by providing the division and product teams with reliable, scalable, secure, and reusable platforms.

Implementation and Launch of Platforms

• Take ownership of the end-to-end implementation of platform digital capabilities, including internal team, vendor, systems integrator management, and total cost of ownership.
• Foster excellence by improving velocity, quality, reliability, predictability, and agile maturity across multiple squads.
• Track implementation metrics, identify bottlenecks, and make targeted improvements to productivity and maturity.
• Serve as the primary point of contact for platform, implementation, vendor, and dependency issues, while promoting rapid resolution in a complex environment.
• Ensure that implementations are aligned with the priorities of the product, architecture, engineering, operations, and cybersecurity teams.

Integrate experimental, automation, and continuous improvement practices to improve speed, quality, and sustainability.

Personnel Management and Capacity Development

• Lead, mentor, and refine technical managers and teams by fostering a collaborative, inclusive, accountable, and execution-focused culture.
• Design and optimize team structures to clarify platform ownership and responsibilities, and support implementation results and modernization priorities.
• Collaborate with leaders of engineering, product, and operations communities and teams for workforce planning, clear role assignment, succession planning, and capacity development.
• Develop internal capabilities in digital engineering, activation, agile implementation, vendor management, and operational excellence.

Mentor leaders to manage performance effectively, clarify responsibilities, and build resilient teams in the face of change and transformation.

Financial Management and Vendor Management

• Lead budget management, including annual planning, cost tracking, capitalization, forecasting, and investment prioritization.
• Manage strategic relationships with vendors and systems integrators, holding partners accountable for quality, results, knowledge transfer, and value creation.
• Promote cost transparency and technological spending optimization for applications, infrastructure, security, vendors, and platform investments.

Target opportunities to reduce long-term dependence on external partners while strengthening internal platform ownership and capabilities.

Operational Excellence, Risk, and Security

• Ensure the stability, security, currency, resilience, and end-of-life decommissioning of applications.
• Establish governance processes that consider implementation speed, risk management, audits, regulatory and compliance requirements, and cybersecurity.
• Collaborate with Application Operations Services to ensure effective incident, change, disaster recovery, and business continuity planning management.

Proactively manage operational risk, application health, technical debt, and service reliability across all shared digital capabilities.

Interfunctional Collaboration and Stakeholder Engagement

• Serve as a strategic technology partner to leaders of the product, client experience, operations, architecture, cybersecurity, and enterprise technology teams.
• Communicate digital strategy, implementation status, risks, trade-offs, and dependencies clearly and transparently.
• Represent the digital technology function in executive forums by providing a business perspective, an outside view, and pragmatic recommendations.