I am Brent Foster.
I cam currently the Vice President, Engineering Practices Owner & DevSecOps Executive Product Owner and Platform Technology Lead at TD Bank. I have a distinctive blend of interesting and progressive experience from roles at TD Bank, Amazon, Capital One, American Express, General Dynamics, AvalonBay Communities, and some of my own entrepreneurial endeavors. I am equal parts engineering leader and hands-on builder. I tackle challenges head on and am always excited for a new opportunity. I love envisioning and developing new and exciting products and experiences through data and software.
As the Engineering Practices Owner, I’m focused on creating an environment and culture that attracts, develops, and retains top engineering talent to meet the ever-growing demands for engineering talent throughout TD.
As
the DevSecOps Executive Product Owner and Technology Lead, I'm working to empower developers with a secure, composable, and automated DevSecOps platform that transforms software delivery into a seamless, policy-driven, and
self-serve experience — enabling production deployment on every pull request with zero manual intervention, continuous compliance, and integrated observability across the software development lifecycle.
Clearing the Path to Build
https://betakit.com/td-is-assembling-a-roster-of-top-technical-talent/
I joined TD from Amazon, where I led engineering teams at global scale. The move from a tech giant to a highly regulated Canadian bank opened up the kinds of challenges I find most compelling.
“I saw TD and the financial services industry as a great place to solve interesting challenges at scale, where you have the resources and the backing to do it while growing and developing talent.”
As Vice President,
Engineering Practices and DevSecOps Owner at TD, I lead several pillars of TD’s engineering transformation, including defining and applying best practices, DevSecOps, open source program office, software supply chain and builder tools,
and talent acceleration. My focus is on making the development experience faster, safer, and more efficient from the earliest stages of design to full production rollout.
The concept plays out in how TD handles composable architecture.
Engineers begin with pre-approved patterns, such as building a secure API, then work through reference implementations that handle compliance and testing. The result is less time spent on foundational setup and more time spent on meaningful
work.
“One of the things that we’re working hard to do is help remove any barriers we have between folks managing risk and security considerations, folks who are building software, and folks who are operating in production. We want to bring all of that together in a more cohesive way.”
This approach enabled our engineering team to contribute to the launch of partial shares, a TD Direct Investing product that lets customers purchase fractions of stocks. Supporting fractional values required changes to interface specs,
databases, and testing frameworks.
To help teams ship quickly, my group enabled ephemeral environments—short-lived testing setups seeded with realistic data. Engineers can spin up everything they need to test a new feature,
run it, and tear it down automatically.
Just as much effort goes into people. Day to day, engineers can build new skills through internal TechCon events, prompt-a-thons, and other challenges. They can take on complex projects
without leaving the technical track, thanks to roles like the Distinguished Engineer. And they can stay engaged through platforms that support feedback, peer learning, and shared ownership.
“Happy people are productive people, and part of that, from a talent acceleration perspective, is recognizing the importance of fostering everyone’s growth and development.”
What I can do for you:
- Concept & Strategy
- Digital Transformation Initiatives
- Product & Experience Development
- Agile & DevSecOps
- Cloud Native Architecture
- Experimentation & Prototyping
- Transformative Usage of Agentic AI Orchestration and GenAI Tools at Scale
Contact me:
- 480 2517828
- brent@brentfoster.me