Deputy Executive Director

Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) provides emergency medical humanitarian care to people affected by conflict, epidemics, disasters, or exclusion from healthcare. We provide assistance based on need, regardless of ethnicity, gender, religion or political affiliation. We also speak out about the suffering we witness while carrying out our work.

Applications will be accepted until 09:00am EDT on Friday, 31 July 2026

At the core of Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) Canada’s identity is a commitment to medical ethics, independence, neutrality, and impartiality. We go where people’s medical needs are greatest. These ideals have driven every aspect of our work – from medical care and logistical coordination, to finance and communications – since MSF was established in 1971.

The Deputy Executive Director (Deputy) serves as the operational backbone of MSF Canada, ensuring that strategy translates into action across all departments while maintaining the organizational health, accountability, and cross-functional cohesion needed to deliver on MSF Canada's mission.

By bridging leadership, operations, risk, and governance, this role amplifies the Executive Director's capacity and keeps the organization running with clarity and purpose. Internally and externally, the Deputy strengthens MSF Canada's credibility as a well-managed, mission-aligned organization.

Our Values

Our work is guided by the humanitarian principles of impartiality, neutrality, and independence, rooted in universal medical ethics.

We bring these principles to life through the way we treat each other, work, and relate to the global MSF movement:

• Respect, Integrity, Inclusion – fostering a workplace grounded in equity and belonging

• Discovery, Learning, Boldness – embracing curiosity, innovation, and courageous action

• Impact, Transformation, Shared Responsibility – driving meaningful change and collective accountability

These values shape our culture and guide everything we do to uphold MSF’s social mission.

MSF Canada is looking for someone who will be responsible to:

• Lead day-to-day operations: Drive organizational effectiveness across departments, by leading the planning and accountability cycle

• Manage senior leaders: Directly oversee Finance and Administration, IT, Human Resources, Strategy and Planning, while building team capacity through coaching, accountability and cross functional collaboration.

• Oversee risk and compliance: Maintain organizational readiness through critical incident preparedness, risk registry management, and oversight and cross functional risk mitigation of MSF Canada's legal and data privacy obligations. Ensure compliance across Finance, HR, and IT, including data privacy, legal obligations, and safeguarding casework (with high‑impact cases escalated to the ED). Lead operational risk response within agreed thresholds.

• Strategic partnership with the Executive Director: Act as the ED’s strategic partner, ensuring alignment between internal operations and external/movement‑facing priorities. Providing operational insight for governance reporting, Board engagement, and organizational health monitoring. Ensuring the ED has a clear line of sight into culture signals, safeguarding patterns, risk, and performance.

• Represent and connect: Support the Executive Director in representing MSF Canada internally and externally, preparing the organization for engagements with the movement and the public, and connecting internal teams, the Association, and governance bodies to strengthen MSF Canada's cohesion, credibility, and networks.

A detailed job description is available HERE.

The successful candidate will bring to MSF Canada:

• Genuine interest in, understanding of, and commitment to, the humanitarian principles and the social mission of MSF

• Proficiency in spoken and written English and French

• Culturally humble, equity-minded, and able to model inclusive leadership across a diverse organization

• Demonstrated senior leadership experience in a complex, multi-stakeholder organization - nonprofit, humanitarian, or similarly mission-driven environment

• Proven track record managing cross-functional teams and executive level direct reports

• Ability to lead and develop high-performing teams, with a coaching and accountability-oriented approach

• Extensive experience bridging departments and creating conditions for collaboration across an organization

• Comfortable holding both strategic and operational responsibilities simultaneously

• Strong organizational and process management skills, with experience running planning and reporting cycles

• Ability to identify, assess, and mitigate organizational risk

• Familiarity with financial oversight, IT governance, and/or legal and compliance functions

• Good communicator in both internal leadership and public contexts where needed in support of the organization’s leadership

Working Conditions:

• Regular hours Monday to Friday (9 a.m.–5 p.m., core hours 10 a.m.–3 p.m.); occasional evenings or weekends.

• Hybrid work model with a 40% in MSF Canada office requirement (2 days/week)

• Designated office consists of sit/stand desk, swivel chair, laptop with dock and double monitor, task lamp, small seating area

• Interaction with stakeholders, donors and the public where needed

• Domestic travel (<10%) between Montreal and Toronto office, for leadership retreats, and to attend Annual General Assembly (AGA)

Position Status: Fixed term contract (4 years with possibility to extend up to a maximum of 8 years)

Benefits:

• Comprehensive group insurance (health, dental, life, AD&D, prescriptions, etc.)

• 5% RRSP contribution (no matching required)

• 4 weeks’ vacation annually

• Health Spending Accounts

• Flexible work hours

• Annual Professional Development budget

• Employee & Family Assistance Program (EFAP)

• Access to internal Psychosocial Care Unit Services

Vacancy notice

This posting is for a an existing position and is not intended to create an ongoing candidate pool for future openings. Qualified applications will be individually assessed for this role only.

AI disclosure statement

We do not use artificial intelligence (AI) to automatically screen or select candidates for interview. AI may be used in the hiring process to assist our recruitment team by:

• Summarizing recruiter or hiring manager notes, and

• Conducting limited keyword searches for specific job‑related criteria.

However, every application is reviewed by a qualified human to assess transferable or similar experience, regardless of any AI‑assisted preliminaries.

Safeguarding

MSF is committed to preventing abuse, inappropriate behavior, lack of integrity and financial misconduct in its work and care spaces. MSF expects all staff to share this commitment and promote an environment where abuse and misconduct is not tolerated.

Accessibility

Any questions or concerns regarding accommodation and accessibility may be addressed to Human Resources.