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General Function The Director, Software Engineering is accountable for people leadership, engineering excellence, and delivery for Fifth Third Direct, the primary digital entry point for the Bank’s Commercial clients. This leader connects modernization outcomes to business priorities, client experience, risk management, and the long-term health of the technology estate. The role influences leaders across Product, Architecture, Operations, Risk, Security, Data, and other technology groups to deliver secure, connected, and scalable commercial banking experiences. The Director leads through managers and/or individual contributors, develops talent, removes organizational impediments, establishes engineering expectations, and balances modernization with the reliability, regulatory obligations, and business commitments of existing platforms. The role is expected to create clarity across complex, multi-team initiatives and guide work from discovery and architecture through implementation, production readiness, adoption, migration, and legacy retirement.
Business-Area Focus: Fifth Third Direct Replatforming and Modernization This role leads engineering for the replatforming and modernization of Fifth Third Direct, the primary digital banking experience for Commercial clients. The focus is on transforming legacy capabilities into modular, cloud-native solutions while improving client journeys, platform resilience, scalability, and speed of delivery.
Modernize the commercial digital experience: Lead the phased modernization of Fifth Third Direct and its supporting capabilities. Partner with Product to reduce client friction, simplify workflows, improve consistency, and establish a forward-looking roadmap for the Commercial digital experience.
Decompose legacy applications: Guide the separation of tightly coupled applications into modular front-end, back-end, API, and shared-service components. Establish clear domain boundaries, service contracts, data ownership, and migration paths.
Define cloud-native hosting strategies: Partner with Architecture and platform teams to determine appropriate hosting strategies for user experiences, services, data, and integration components. Promote containerization, automation, scalability, resilience, security, and efficient use of cloud and enterprise platforms.
Operate today while building the replacement: Maintain the stability, security, and delivery commitments of Fifth Third Direct while sequencing migrations, production readiness, client adoption, and retirement of legacy capabilities. Avoid unnecessary expansion of legacy solutions when a modern replacement is planned or in flight.
Lead end-to-end commercial client journey design: Ensure plans account for the complete client and operational journey, including onboarding, navigation, entitlements, servicing, transaction initiation, approvals, reporting, support, and movement between digital and assisted channels.
Engineer for high-volume digital channels: Lead technologies that support high transaction volumes, demanding availability requirements, complex commercial client structures, and changing usage patterns. Ensure the platform can scale while maintaining performance, reliability, security, and a consistent client experience.
Deliver enterprise modernization dependencies: Coordinate changes required across Commercial products, shared services, data platforms, security capabilities, and enterprise programs. Align scope, ownership, priority, testing, migration, and readiness across Product, Architecture, dependent engineering teams, operations, and external partners.
Enable reusable commercial banking capabilities: Build shared services and platform components that can be reused across Fifth Third Direct and other Commercial channels. Keep discovery and architecture work distinct from committed implementation scope, with explicit ownership and entry criteria.
Essential Duties and Responsibilities
- Own the engineering strategy and multi-year modernization roadmap for Fifth Third Direct, connecting architecture, client outcomes, delivery sequencing, operational readiness, migration, and legacy retirement.
- Develop and coach engineering managers and individual contributors while balancing organizational needs, career growth, succession planning, recognition, and performance accountability.
- Build effective teams through hiring, internal talent development, clear role expectations, and deliberate use of onshore, nearshore, and offshore delivery models where applicable.
- Create strong partnerships with Product and Commercial business leaders to shape the client experience, clarify requirements, expose tradeoffs, and align investment to measurable client and business value.
- Ensure initiatives have complete business and technical definitions before implementation, including client journeys, domain boundaries, service contracts, data ownership, dependencies, controls, analytics, migration needs, and unresolved decisions.
- Lead architecture and engineering decisions that improve modularity, reuse, scalability, resilience, security, maintainability, accessibility, and speed of change across the platform.
- Establish strategies for separating front-end experiences from back-end services and selecting appropriate cloud, container, data, and integration patterns for each component.
- Balance feature delivery, modernization milestones, enterprise dependencies, risk remediation, maintenance, and production health through visible prioritization and capacity decisions.
- Establish production-readiness expectations covering observability, performance, capacity, resiliency, support procedures, incident response, recovery, release controls, and operational ownership.
- Use engineering, product, and client measures to manage outcomes, including delivery predictability, availability, performance, defects, flow efficiency, client adoption, satisfaction, and legacy reduction.
- Identify organizational gaps and impediments, then apply multiple approaches to resolve cultural barriers, unclear ownership, process friction, capacity constraints, or cross-team dependencies.
- Facilitate communication, cooperation, and continuous feedback across teams. Build an environment where concerns are raised early, decisions are documented, and issues are resolved constructively.
- Act as a leader of the software engineering craft by sharing practices, setting standards, strengthening technical leadership, and influencing the future direction of engineering across the organization.
- Participate actively in hiring experienced professionals and early-career talent, and execute workforce and insourcing strategies aligned to the long-term needs of the platform.
Risk, Security, and Customer Accountability The Director is responsible and accountable for identifying and managing risk through open exchange of ideas, timely escalation of concerns, and consistent adherence to policies and procedures. The role ensures that engineering decisions protect Commercial clients and colleagues, operate within the Bank’s risk appetite, and include appropriate controls for security, privacy, identity, entitlements, fraud, resilience, regulatory compliance, and third-party dependencies.
- Require clear ownership and trusted sources for client identity, user entitlements, account access, approvals, consent, and sensitive data across digital and service-to-service interactions.
- Ensure risks, assumptions, control gaps, migration concerns, and production-readiness issues are visible and resolved or formally accepted before launch.
- Promote a positive Commercial client experience while consistently identifying, assessing, managing, monitoring, and reporting risks of all types.
People Leadership and Supervisory Responsibilities Responsibilities include performance management, focused investment in people growth, timely feedback and coaching, compensation processes, succession planning, workforce planning, recognition, employee engagement, and disciplinary activities when needed. The Director may supervise engineering managers and/or individual contributors and is accountable for creating a trusting, inclusive, and high-performing environment.
Minimum Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities
- Typically 8–12 years of progressive software engineering experience, including significant people leadership and accountability for complex technology delivery. Equivalent combinations of education and experience will be considered.
- Bachelor’s or advanced degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
- Demonstrated success modernizing large, customer-facing legacy platforms while maintaining critical production services and business commitments.
- Deep experience decomposing monolithic applications into modular front-end, back-end, API, event-driven, and shared-service components.
- Strong understanding of containerized and cloud-native engineering, including orchestration, platform engineering, automated infrastructure, CI/CD, secure development, observability, resilience, and production operations.
- Experience defining hosting and migration strategies across user interfaces, services, integrations, and data components, including hybrid environments.
- Experience leading high-volume digital platforms with demanding availability, performance, security, and scalability requirements.
- Experience leading multi-team programs with significant cross-functional dependencies and translating complex technical information into clear decisions for executive, business, and engineering audiences.
- Strong working knowledge of authentication, authorization, entitlements, security, privacy, fraud, risk, and control considerations within regulated digital experiences.
- Ability to shape roadmaps, sequence migration and retirement work, manage technical debt, and make tradeoffs across client outcomes, risk, cost, capacity, and time.
- Proven ability to coach leaders, grow technical talent, build succession, and create accountability without weakening team autonomy.
- Critical thinking, systems thinking, and creative problem-solving skills, with the ability to lead change through influence across organizational boundaries.
- Working knowledge of agile and product operating principles, with an emphasis on outcomes, flow, feedback, and continuous improvement rather than process compliance alone.
Preferred Experience
- Leadership experience in commercial banking, treasury management, financial services, fintech, or another highly regulated industry.
- Experience with commercial digital banking platforms, including account information, payments, transaction approvals, entitlements, reporting, administration, or client servicing.
- Experience delivering container-based solutions using Kubernetes or comparable orchestration technologies and public or private cloud platforms.
- Experience implementing API-first, event-driven, micro-frontend, or domain-oriented architectures at enterprise scale.
- Experience delivering platform conversions, incremental migrations, parallel operations, client pilots, and legacy decommissioning for high-volume production systems.
- Experience partnering with third-party technology providers, payment networks, or processors and coordinating internal readiness across business and technology teams.
Director, Software Engineering
At Fifth Third, we understand the importance of recognizing our employees for the role they play in improving the lives of our customers, communities and each other. Our Total Rewards include comprehensive benefits and differentiated compensation offerings to give each employee the opportunity to be their best every day.
The base salary for this position is reflective of the range of salary levels for all roles within this pay grade across the U.S. Individual salaries within this range will vary based on factors such as role, relevant skillset, relevant experience, education and geographic location. In addition to the base salary, this role is eligible to participate in an incentive compensation plan, with any such payment based upon company, line of business and/or individual performance.
Our extensive benefits programs are designed to support the individual needs of our employees and their families, encompassing physical, financial, emotional and social well-being. You can learn more about those programs on our 53.com Careers page at: https://www.53.com/content/fifth-third/en/careers/benefits.html or by consulting with your talent acquisition partner.
LOCATION -- Cincinnati, Ohio 45202 Attention search firms and staffing agencies: do not submit unsolicited resumes for this posting. Fifth Third does not accept resumes from any agency that does not have an active agreement with Fifth Third. Any unsolicited resumes – no matter how they are submitted – will be considered the property of Fifth Third and Fifth Third will not be responsible for any associated fee.
Fifth Third Bank, National Association is proud to have an engaged and inclusive culture and to promote and ensure equal employment opportunity in all employment decisions regardless of race, color, gender, national origin, religion, age, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity, military status, veteran status or any other legally protected status.
