Chief Technology Officer

Firstrust Bank Recognizes the Leader in YouAs one of the region's foremost community banking institutions, we take pride in fostering leadership.As a Firstrust employee, your growth is our growth. For you, that means great benefits, performance-based pay, a meaningful role, and resources to help your success. For us, that means employees who offer exemplary customer service with a commitment to our values - honesty, integrity, and accountability.Onsite Position - Operations Center - Horsham, PAProvide strategic and operational leadership across Firstrust Bank's technology delivery and digital transformation functions. This role has broad and intentional scope, encompassing four distinct functional pillars: a newly established Project Management & Governance (PMO) function, Digital Experience (data & integrations, platform development, and online banking), Network Operations & Reporting, and Systems Support. As a direct report to the Chief Operating Officer and a member of senior leadership, the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) is accountable for both keeping Firstrust's technology infrastructure reliable, current, and secure, and for driving the digital transformation agenda.This is a role with two distinct and equally important dimensions: the operational — ensuring day-to-day technology delivery across an established, functioning team — and the transformational — building new organizational capabilities, the ongoing work of simplifying and improving the Bank's technology solutions, and providing executive-level accountability for platform programs. Central to both dimensions is building the institutional infrastructure for responsible AI adoption: starting with readiness — the data foundation, vendor governance, and evaluation discipline required to assess AI tools and AI agents responsibly — and extending over time to the deliberate, business-value-driven use of AI at scale, always within the constraints appropriate to a regulated financial institution.Project Management & GovernanceEstablish, staff, and lead the Bank's new Project Management Office — a function that does not currently exist at this scale. An initial team of project managers and business analysts will be recruited as part of this build; the CTO will define the team's structure, hiring profile, and operating model in partnership with the COO.Design and implement a governance model that produces agreed, aligned project prioritization across business units and technology teams — transparent, dynamic, and directly tied to objectives. This includes defining intake processes, prioritization criteria, escalation paths, and executive reporting cadence.Oversee the end-to-end project lifecycle for all technology initiatives: planning, execution, risk and dependency management, scope control, budget tracking, and delivery. Establish consistent standards, tools, and reporting frameworks across the portfolio.Develop and maintain portfolio-level reporting for the COO and executive leadership, providing timely visibility into project status, resource constraints, budget performance, and strategic alignment.Evaluate and develop a roadmap for the long-term scope of the PMO — including whether enterprise-wide (non-technology) project governance is within its eventual mandate — in partnership with the COO and executive leadership.Digital Experience & Platform StrategyThe Digital Experience team is an existing, functioning organization encompassing three sub-domains. The CTO's mandate is to provide executive-level oversight, elevate strategic alignment, and ensure delivery discipline and outcomes — particularly for the Bank's most consequential platform programs.Provide executive oversight of the Digital Experience function and its three domains: Data & Integrations, Platform Development/Salesforce, and Online Banking. Ensure the team is appropriately resourced, well-led, and delivering against both operational commitments and strategic transformation objectives.Drive value realization from the Bank's most significant platform investments — particularly FirstCLASS (Salesforce) and the Commercial Loan Transformation — ensuring adoption, cross-system integration, and measurable improvements in efficiency, effectiveness, and customer experience are achieved and sustained.Oversee the maturation of the Bank's data and integrations capabilities, ensuring data infrastructure is structured, governed, and current enough to serve as a reliable foundation for analytics, reporting, and AI evaluation and use.Oversee effective digital transformation and process automation initiatives across customer-facing and operational workflows, with explicit focus on embracing the future of financial services through platform experiences, data, and integrations.Identify, evaluate, and manage strategic FinTech partnerships that extend the Bank's capabilities in areas including AI, payments, analytics, and platform experiences. This could be in collaboration with our Hatch subsidiary or with Verde Technology Ventures.Ensure online banking platforms remain competitive, stable, and compliant, and that digital channel investments are aligned with customer expectations and the Bank's strategic direction.AI Readiness & Business ValueFirstrust's AI strategy is one of intentional, business-value-driven adoption — not experimentation for its own sake. The CTO is the organizational owner of this agenda: building the infrastructure, governance, and evaluation discipline that allows the Bank to move deliberately as AI tools — including agents — mature, and over time using AI to deliver measurable business value in areas such as efficiency, risk reduction, and customer experience. The immediate work is foundational; the mandate extends to realized value as that foundation matures.Develop and maintain the Bank's AI readiness framework: the data quality standards, vendor evaluation criteria, risk governance processes, and organizational capabilities required to assess AI tools and AI agents at scale before adoption decisions are made.Ensure the Bank's data infrastructure — particularly within the Data & Integrations domain — meets the structural and governance requirements that responsible AI evaluation and use demand: clean, connected, well-governed data is the prerequisite for any value realized downstream.Evaluate AI capabilities emerging from the Bank's existing strategic vendor relationships — including Microsoft, Salesforce, Vikar, and Q2 — with a disciplined lens on regulatory compliance, data privacy, auditability, and demonstrable business value; maintain a clear log of what has been evaluated, on what criteria, and with what conclusion.As readiness infrastructure matures, identify and prioritize specific use cases where AI can deliver measurable business value — efficiency gains, risk reduction, improved customer experience, or operational cost savings — and oversee responsible deployment, with clear success metrics and post-deployment review.Establish and maintain the regulatory and risk governance framework within which AI evaluation, adoption, and ongoing use occurs — including model risk considerations, third-party AI vendor oversight, and alignment with FDIC and applicable interagency guidance as it evolves.Act as the executive point of accountability for the Bank's AI posture — able to represent to the COO, Board, and examiners what the Bank is doing with AI, what value has been realized or is being pursued, what has been assessed and declined, and why.Monitor the AI and emerging technology landscape on behalf of the Bank; maintain a current, unbiased view of what is genuinely production-ready versus early-stage, and advise executive leadership accordingly. Separate signal from noise.Technology Delivery — Network Operations, Reporting & Systems SupportThe Network Operations & Reporting and Systems Support/Tech Support teams are established, functioning organizations. The CTO provides executive oversight, ensures continued operational reliability, and identifies opportunities for improvement — while enabling these leaders to manage day-to-day operations with appropriate autonomy.Maintain and strengthen the Bank's technology infrastructure — including network operations, systems reliability, reporting infrastructure, and end-user technical support — ensuring performance, availability, and security standards are consistently met across all Bank locations and platforms.Ensure technology operations are aligned with the Bank's risk management expectations, including appropriate controls, redundancy, change management discipline, and incident response protocols.Identify opportunities to improve efficiency and service quality within operational technology through automation, tooling upgrades, and process improvement; balance optimization of existing capabilities with thoughtful evaluation of net-new investment.Establish and maintain operational technology KPIs and management reporting that provide the COO and senior leadership with clear, actionable visibility into infrastructure health, service levels, and operational risk posture.Strategic LeadershipServe as the Bank's senior technology executive and a primary member of the leadership team, accountable for partnering with the COO and executive peers to develop, maintain, and communicate the Bank's technology roadmap. Ensure the roadmap reflects both operational imperatives and strategic transformation priorities and can be explained clearly to non-technical stakeholders, including Board members.Build and sustain a culture within the technology function that values delivery accountability, innovation, continuous improvement, and collaboration with the business lines the function serves.Team Leadership & Organizational DevelopmentRecruit, develop, and retain leadership across four functional teams; ensure direct reports have clearly defined accountabilities, sufficient authority, and the professional support they need to lead and grow.Build organizational capacity within the PMO from the ground up: hire and develop an initial team of project managers and business analysts