Director Operational Risk Jobs in Irvine, CA (NOW HIRING)

Role Overview

State Street is seeking a seasoned technology executive to lead engineering and delivery for the IMS West Middle Office platform supporting one of the firm's most strategic and demanding asset management clients. This role carries accountability for engineering execution, platform stability, operational resilience, technology modernization, and client commitments across a highly complex application ecosystem.

The successful candidate will lead globally distributed teams responsible for both mission-critical legacy platforms and emerging cloud-native solutions. The environment includes large-scale transactional processing systems built on technologies such as COBOL, Sybase, C++, Solaris, and batch-processing frameworks, alongside modern AWS-based services.

This role requires an exceptional leader who can simultaneously drive platform stabilization, operational excellence, risk reduction, modernization, and strategic transformation while serving as a trusted partner to senior business stakeholders and client executives.

Key Responsibilities

1. Engineering Delivery & Execution Leadership

• Own delivery for a set of IMS West Applications, including architecture, engineering, quality assurance, release management, production support, and operational readiness.

• Ensure predictable, high-quality execution against business priorities, regulatory expectations, client commitments, and service-level objectives.

• Establish strong delivery governance, execution discipline, and accountability across globally distributed teams.

• Drive continuous improvement in engineering productivity, quality, and delivery predictability.

2. Platform Stability, Resiliency & Operational Excellence

• Serve as the senior technology leader accountable for platform stability, resiliency, and production service quality.

• Lead initiatives to reduce incidents, eliminate recurring production issues, strengthen operational controls, and improve service reliability.

• Drive improvements in observability, monitoring, automation, self-healing capabilities, disaster recovery readiness, and recoverability.

• Strengthen change management, testing, release governance, and production support disciplines to minimize operational risk.

• Partner closely with business, operations, and technology teams to improve end-to-end process reliability and client outcomes.

• Act as the executive escalation point for critical incidents and ensure transparent communication through resolution.

3. Client Leadership & Executive Engagement

• Build trusted relationships with senior client stakeholders through proactive engagement, transparency, and delivery excellence.

• Represent Technology in executive client forums, service reviews, governance discussions, and issue management engagements.

• Communicate complex technology, operational, and delivery topics in clear business terms.

• Ensure commitments are appropriately managed, risks are communicated early, and client confidence is maintained through effective execution.

• Partner with business leaders to align technology strategy and delivery priorities with client expectations and growth objectives.

4. Legacy Platform Stewardship & Modernization

• Lead engineering teams responsible for critical legacy technologies including COBOL, Sybase, C++, Solaris, and large-scale batch-processing environments.

• Balance stability, risk management, and business continuity needs while advancing long-term modernization objectives.

• Develop and execute transformation roadmaps for application simplification, technical debt reduction, platform decomposition, and cloud migration.

• Ensure institutional knowledge is retained while reducing concentration risk and modernizing skills across the organization.

5. Cloud & Engineering Transformation

• Lead modernization initiatives leveraging AWS, microservices, APIs, event-driven architectures, data platforms, and cloud-native technologies.

• Drive adoption of DevOps, CI/CD, automation, infrastructure-as-code, and engineering best practices.

• Champion AI-enabled engineering and intelligent automation opportunities to improve productivity, quality, and operational effectiveness.

• Establish modern engineering standards that improve scalability, resiliency, maintainability, and speed of delivery.

6. Governance, Risk & Control Excellence

• Establish comprehensive governance frameworks covering delivery health, platform performance, risk management, control effectiveness, and service quality.

• Drive proactive identification and remediation of technology, operational, and delivery risks.

• Ensure adherence to enterprise risk management, cyber security, audit, regulatory, and compliance requirements.

• Foster a culture of accountability, ownership, and continuous risk reduction.

7. Talent & Organizational Leadership

• Build and lead high-performing engineering, DevOps, QA, and production support organizations.

• Develop leadership succession pipelines and strengthen technical depth across both legacy and modern technology domains.

• Attract, retain, and develop senior engineering talent capable of operating in a high-availability, client-centric environment.

• Foster a culture of operational excellence, accountability, innovation, and continuous improvement.

Core Qualifications

• 15+ years of progressive technology leadership experience within asset management, asset servicing, capital markets, banking, or other highly regulated financial institutions.

• Demonstrated success leading large-scale, mission-critical technology platforms with demanding client, operational, and regulatory requirements.

• Proven experience managing both legacy technology environments and modern cloud-native architectures.

• Strong hands-on understanding of technologies including COBOL, Sybase, C/C++, Unix/Solaris, relational databases, and large-scale batch processing systems.

• Experience leading modernization and cloud transformation initiatives leveraging AWS, APIs, microservices, automation, and DevOps practices.

• Track record of improving operational resilience, reducing incidents, strengthening controls, and enhancing production stability.

• Deep expertise in engineering delivery, production support, service management, change governance, and risk management.

• Exceptional executive communication and stakeholder management skills, including direct engagement with senior client executives.

• Experience leading geographically distributed organizations across onshore, offshore, and vendor delivery models.

Preferred Capabilities

• Experience supporting large, sophisticated institutional investment managers or asset owners with complex operational requirements.

• Strong understanding of middle-office operations, trade lifecycle management, fund accounting, investment operations, and asset servicing processes.

• Experience leading large-scale resiliency and remediation programs.

• Background in observability platforms, SRE practices, operational intelligence, and reliability engineering.

• Exposure to AI-enabled software engineering, intelligent automation, and autonomous operations.

• Architecture-level understanding of enterprise platforms, distributed systems, and large-scale data ecosystems.

Work Requirement

• Onsite 4 days a week in office and one day remote

• Standard business hours aligned to project and stakeholder needs(8am to 5pm)

Salary Range:

The range quoted above applies to the role in the location specified. If the candidate would ultimately work outside of the location above, the applicable range could differ.

Employees are eligible to participate in State Street's comprehensive benefits program, which includes: our retirement savings plan (401K) with company match; insurance coverage including basic life, medical, dental, vision, long-term disability, and other optional additional coverages; paid-time off including vacation, sick leave, short term disability, and family care responsibilities; access to our Employee Assistance Program; incentive compensation including eligibility for annual performance-based awards (excluding certain sales roles subject to sales incentive plans); and, eligibility for certain tax advantaged savings plans.

For a full overview, visit https://hrportal.ehr.com/statestreet/Home.

Across the globe, institutional investors rely on us to help them manage risk, respond to challenges, and drive performance and profitability. We keep our clients at the heart of everything we do, and smart, engaged employees are essential to our continued success.

We are committed to fostering an environment where every employee feels valued and empowered to reach their full potential. As an essential partner in our shared success, you'll benefit from inclusive development opportunities, flexible work-life support, paid volunteer days, and vibrant employee networks that keep you connected to what matters most. Join us in shaping the future.

As an Equal Opportunity Employer, we consider all qualified applicants for all positions without regard to race, creed, color, religion, national origin, ancestry, ethnicity, age, disability, genetic information, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, citizenship, marital status, domestic partnership or civil union status, familial status, military and veteran status, and other characteristics protected by applicable law.

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