Santander (www.santander.com) is evolving from a global, high-impact brand into a technology-driven organization, and our people are at the heart of this journey. Together, we are driving a customer-centric transformation that values bold thinking, innovation, and the courage to challenge what’s possible.
This is more than a strategic shift. It’s a chance for driven professionals to grow, learn, and make a real difference.
Our mission is to contribute to help more people and businesses prosper. We embrace a strong risk culture and all our professionals at all levels are expected to take a proactive and responsible approach toward risk management.
Openbank is Santander Group's global digital consumer bank, bringing together retail banking, mobility finance and consumer lending solutions in one integrated digital platform.
THE DIFFERENCE YOU MAKE
Role Purpose
Lead the engineering organization responsible for developing, evolving, and maintaining Openbank Mexico's Core Banking and Digital Channels capabilities.
The CTO will be accountable for delivering secure, scalable, resilient, and high-quality banking technology that enables business growth, outstanding customer experience, regulatory compliance, and sustainable operational efficiency.
Operating within Santander's global technology ecosystem, the CTO will balance local market requirements with global platform strategy, ensuring effective collaboration between Openbank Mexico, ODS, and global technology teams.
The successful candidate will combine deep engineering expertise with strong executive leadership, product orientation, and a proven ability to deliver complex technology initiatives in highly regulated environments.
Key Responsibilities
1. Engineering Strategy & Technical Leadership
- Define and execute the engineering strategy for Group core platforms’ adoption, APIs, integrations, and Digital Channels in alignment with Openbank Mexico's business priorities and Santander's global technology direction.
- Provide technical leadership across backend, mobile, web, and integration engineering.
- Adopt group’s engineering standards that promote scalability, security, maintainability, reliability, and reuse.
- Guide technical decisions, architecture evolution, and the management of technical debt in collaboration with enterprise and platform architecture teams.
- Ensure solutions support both immediate business requirements and the long-term evolution of global banking platforms.
2. End-to-End Engineering Delivery
- Lead engineering execution from technical discovery and design through development, testing, production deployment, and stabilization.
- Ensure coordinated delivery across Core and Channels engineering teams, minimizing dependencies, rework, and integration failures.
- Establish transparent capacity planning, delivery commitments, and technical dependency management.
- Improve engineering predictability, throughput, and time-to-market without compromising quality or operational resilience.
- Partner with Product and business leaders to translate priorities into feasible engineering roadmaps with explicit trade-offs.
3. Engineering Excellence & Developer Productivity
- Establish a culture of engineering excellence based on modern software development practices.
- Drive continuous improvement in code quality, automated testing, CI/CD, DevSecOps, observability, and release engineering.
- Implement meaningful engineering metrics using frameworks such as DORA and SPACE, emphasizing team performance and continuous improvement.
- Accelerate the responsible adoption of AI-assisted software development, testing, code review, and engineering automation.
- Reduce avoidable rework, technical bottlenecks, and release defects through systematic root-cause analysis and preventive improvements.
- Ensure engineering teams maintain clear ownership of software quality throughout the development lifecycle.
4. Platform Evolution & Global Convergence
- Lead the engineering execution of Openbank Mexico's adoption of global Core Banking and Digital Channels capabilities.
- Collaborate with global technology leaders to influence platform roadmaps and ensure Mexican market requirements are adequately represented.
- Promote reusable, configurable, API-first, and modular solutions that can scale across Santander entities.
- Evaluate local engineering solutions when global capabilities cannot meet critical regulatory, customer, or business requirements within acceptable timeframes.
- Manage platform migration and modernization risks, including compatibility, regression, integration complexity, and production stability.
- Ensure local technical customization does not create unnecessary long-term fragmentation or technical debt.
5. Reliability, Security & Regulatory Readiness
- Ensure engineering solutions meet applicable security, resilience, auditability, and regulatory requirements.
- Work closely with SRE, Infrastructure, CISO, Risk, Compliance, and Operations to strengthen production reliability.
- Establish effective engineering participation in incident resolution, problem management, and root-cause remediation.
- Improve release quality through automated regression testing, technical quality gates, and controlled deployments.
- Ensure adequate engineering support and technical ownership for business-critical platforms and services.
- Contribute to disaster recovery and business continuity readiness for systems within the engineering perimeter.
6. Engineering Organization & Talent Development
- Lead and develop engineering managers, technical leads, and software engineers across Core and Channels.
- Build a high-performance engineering culture emphasizing ownership, collaboration, accountability, technical excellence, and continuous learning.
- Develop technical leadership pipelines, succession plans, and engineering career paths in coordination with ODS People leadership.
- Ensure appropriate engineering skills, team structures, and capacity allocation to support business priorities.
- Strengthen local engineering capabilities while leveraging global engineering expertise and reusable assets.
- Promote knowledge sharing and reduce dependency on individual engineers or geographically concentrated teams.
7. Stakeholder Management & Matrix Leadership
- Serve as the principal engineering counterpart to Openbank Mexico's Head of Technology & Operations, Product leadership, and relevant ODS executives.
- Translate business priorities into clear engineering requirements and negotiate capacity, sequencing, and technical trade-offs with global stakeholders.
- Establish effective governance for resolving conflicts between local delivery needs and global platform priorities.
- Provide transparent executive reporting on engineering performance, delivery risks, dependencies, and remediation plans.
- Foster a One Team operating model across Product, Engineering, QA, Architecture, and Operations.
- Escalate material risks with clear alternatives, business implications, and recommended decisions.
Required Experience & Qualifications
- 12+ years of experience in software engineering, including significant experience leading complex engineering organizations.
- Proven leadership across backend/core platforms and customer-facing digital channels.
- Demonstrated experience delivering large-scale, mission-critical, highly available transactional systems.
- Strong understanding of distributed systems, cloud-native architectures, APIs, event-driven integration, and modern software engineering practices.
- Experience leading engineering transformation, improving developer productivity, and strengthening software delivery quality.
- Demonstrated ability to operate effectively in complex, global matrix organizations with shared ownership and constrained resources.
- Experience managing technology modernization, legacy integration, and large-scale platform migrations.
- Strong knowledge of DevSecOps, CI/CD, automated testing, observability, and software reliability practices.
- Experience in financial services or other highly regulated, transaction-intensive industries; digital banking experience strongly preferred.
- Strong executive communication, negotiation, and stakeholder management capabilities.
- Fluency in Spanish and English.
Leadership Competencies
- Deep technical judgment combined with strong business acumen.
- Ability to translate strategic objectives into engineering execution.
- Customer and product orientation.
- Systems thinking and architectural discipline.
- Strong prioritization and trade-off management.
- Evidence-based decision-making.
- Ability to challenge assumptions constructively and resolve complex cross-functional dependencies.
- Talent development and engineering culture leadership.
- Accountability for results, quality, and long-term sustainability.
WE VALUE YOUR IMPACT
Your contribution matters, and it’s recognized. You can expect a fair, competitive reward package that reflects the impact you create and the value you deliver. But we know rewards go beyond numbers.
- We offer more than just a paycheck—our benefits are designed to support your life, your goals and your well-being, now and into the future.
- Your health is our priority. Through BeHealthy, our global wellness programme, we promote Holistic wellbeing
- We know family is everything. That’s why we offer parental leave, childcare support and family-friendly programmes tailored to each life stage.
- We’re enable our teams to go beyond through global opportunities and broad career paths.
- We believe in the power of helping. You can dedicate part of your working hours to volunteering
We’re here to keep you motivated, help you reach your goals, and celebrate your progress, every step of the way.
Openbank is an equal opportunity employer. All applicants will be considered as equal without paying attention to gender identity, sexual orientation, ethnicity, religion, age, political orientation, union membership nor disability status.
We make recruiting decisions based on your experience and skills. We value your passion to discover, invent, simplify, and build.