Technology Director - Financial Crimes Risk Management Technology

About this role:
Wells Fargo is seeking a Technology Director - Financial Crimes Risk Management Technology.
The Technology Director - Financial Crimes Risk Management Technology will lead the transformation, delivery, and operational excellence of a significant portfolio of Financial Crimes Risk Management applications. This senior leadership position is responsible for executing the Financial Crimes Technology strategy, translating enterprise priorities into actionable roadmaps, and delivering secure, resilient, scalable, and user-centric capabilities.
This role will be within Enterprise Functions Technology (EFT) and will drive platform modernization, AI-enabled transformation, data strategies, engineering excellence, regulatory readiness, technology risk management, and strong partnerships with Financial Crimes business, product, operations, risk, and compliance teams. The ideal leader will combine deep expertise in Financial Crimes Risk Management applications with strong technical understanding of AI/ML, distributed systems, modern data platforms, cloud-ready architectures, and enterprise engineering practices. The successful candidate will have a strong technical background, proven leadership experience, disciplined execution, and a focus on delivering measurable business and risk outcomes.
At Wells Fargo, we value you for who you are and the potential you possess. Our innovative approach to work empowers individuals nationwide to express themselves, excel, and take bold steps. Recognizing each person's uniqueness brings out their utmost capabilities. Join us at Wells Fargo, where we strive to bring out your best by giving you ours in return.
In this role, you will:
Manage a team of engineering managers and engineering leads
Manage a team of architects, and senior engineers accountable for Financial Crimes technology delivery and operations.
Focus on delivering commitments aligned to enterprise strategic priorities
Build support for strategies with business and technology leaders
Execute technology strategies aligned with enterprise priorities and the broader Financial Crimes Technology direction.
Build support for strategies and investment priorities with business, product, risk, compliance, operations, data, architecture, and technology leaders.
Guide development of actionable roadmaps and plans
Guide development and execution of measurable outcomes.
Identify opportunities and strategies for continuous improvement of software engineering practices
Identify opportunities for continuous improvement in delivery governance, operational effectiveness, and platform health.
Provide oversight to software craftsmanship, security, availability, resilience, and scalability of solutions developed by the teams or third party providers
Provide oversight of maintainability of solutions delivered by internal teams and third-party providers.
Lead delivery of regulatory, risk, control, and technology commitments with strong execution discipline and transparent reporting.
Set technology risk management expectations and partner with stakeholders to address vulnerabilities, resiliency risks, end-of-life technologies, technical debt, and control gaps.
Manage budgets, investments, vendor engagements, sourcing strategies, and engineering capacity in alignment with portfolio priorities.
Develop strategies to hire, retain, and grow engineering talent, strengthen leadership succession, and build critical domain and technical capabilities.
Lead complex transformation programs, large-scale migrations, platform upgrades, and integrations while protecting production stability and minimizing delivery risk.
Champion responsible adoption of AI-enabled capabilities for both engineering productivity and Financial Crimes business processes, with clear measures of adoption, quality, efficiency, and value.
Collaborate with and influence professionals at all levels, including senior business and technology leaders, control partners, auditors, regulators, and external service providers.
Create a culture of ownership, innovation, transparency, collaboration, continuous learning, and accountability.
Lead the team to achieve business, regulatory, engineering, talent, financial, and operational objectives.
Identify financial management and strategic resourcing
Set risk management guidelines and partner with stakeholders to implement key risk initiatives
Develop strategies for hiring engineering talent
Lead implementation of projects and encourage engineering innovation
Collaborate and influence all levels of professionals including more experienced managers
Lead team to achieve objectives
Interface with external agencies, regulatory bodies or industry forums
Manage allocation of people and financial resources for Technology Strategic Leadership
Develop and guide a culture of talent development to meet business objectives and strategy
Strategic Leadership & Transformation
Execute the multi-year transformation of Financial Crimes Risk Management technology through AI, automation, modern data capabilities, and scalable engineering platforms.
Translate the Financial Crimes Technology strategy into portfolio-level target states, sequenced roadmaps, investment priorities, and delivery plans.
Drive modernization of legacy systems toward resilient, modular, API-enabled, distributed, and cloud-ready architectures.
Partner with business, product, operations, risk, compliance, data, and architecture teams to align technology outcomes with enterprise priorities and regulatory expectations.
Balance modernization, risk reduction, regulatory delivery, production stability, and business capability enhancement when setting priorities.
Establish outcome-based measures for modernization progress, delivery predictability, technology health, engineering productivity, and business value realization.
Financial Crimes Risk Management Technology Delivery
Oversee the design, build, maintenance, and enhancement of Financial Crimes Risk Management applications and shared capabilities within the assigned portfolio.
Provide domain-informed leadership across capabilities such as Transaction Monitoring, Customer Due Diligence, Customer and Transaction Screening, Sanctions, Investigations, Case Management, Financial Crimes data services, and regulatory reporting, as applicable to the portfolio.
Deliver regulatory and business commitments with appropriate quality, traceability, controls, and operational readiness.
Drive simplification, platform consolidation, workflow automation, reuse of common capabilities, and reduction of avoidable application and process fragmentation.
Improve delivery effectiveness through clear product and technology alignment, disciplined prioritization, dependency management, and transparent governance.
Ensure solutions are designed around user needs and deliver measurable improvements in detection, screening, investigation, decision support, operational efficiency, and risk management.
Deploy AI-based solutions supporting both technology and business use cases, with responsible controls and measurable outcomes.
Data, Architecture & Engineering Excellence
Champion data quality, lineage, governance, observability, security, and fit-for-purpose data design across Financial Crimes platforms.
Drive adoption of modern engineering practices, including DevSecOps, automated testing, continuous delivery, platform engineering, site reliability engineering, API-first design, microservices, and event-driven patterns where appropriate.
Advance modern data platforms and analytics capabilities that support risk detection, screening, investigations, reporting, forecasting, and portfolio monitoring.
Establish and enforce architecture principles, engineering guardrails, reusable patterns, and non-functional requirements that improve interoperability, resilience, scalability, and maintainability.
Lead large-scale migrations, upgrades, integrations, and data transformations with clear transition states, risk controls, and decommissioning outcomes.
Improve software quality and engineering productivity through responsible use of AI-assisted engineering, automation, standard toolchains, and objective measures.
Maintain strong focus on production stability, incident prevention, recovery readiness, capacity, performance, and elimination of key-person dependencies.
Provide technology leadership across diverse application and data platforms, including Java, .NET, Python, JavaScript, Big Data, PySpark, Ab Initio, SSIS, and mainframe ecosystems, ensuring engineering standards, modernization priorities, architectural consistency, and long-term platform sustainability.
Leadership & Stakeholder Management
Lead, mentor, and develop a high-performing global engineering organization with clear accountability for outcomes.
Build trusted partnerships with Financial Crimes business, product, operations, risk, compliance, data, audit, and enterprise technology stakeholders.
Communicate strategy, priorities, trade-o