Chief Technology Officer — Engineering | ODS Openbank México

Universia México; Panindicuaro; On-site; MXN 3,500,000 - 5,500,000; Full time

Job summary

Openbank Mexico seeks a CTO to lead the engineering organization responsible for Core Banking and Digital Channels, delivering secure, scalable, and high-quality banking technology that drives growth and exceptional customer experience.

Reporting within Santander's global tech ecosystem, the CTO will align local market needs with global platform strategy, collaborating with Openbank Mexico, ODS, and global teams on complex, regulated initiatives.

Responsibilities

• Engineering Strategy & Technical Leadership
• End-to-End Engineering Delivery
• Engineering Excellence & Developer Productivity
• Platform Evolution & Global Convergence
• Reliability, Security & Regulatory Readiness

Job description

Country: Mexico

Santander (*****************) 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

• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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 p...