Associate Director, Software Engineering (Knowledge & RAG Platform Engineering Lead)

Some careers have more impact than others.

If you’re looking for a career where you can make a real impression, join HSBC and discover how valued you’ll be.

We are currently seeking an experienced professional to join our team in the role of Associate Director, Software Engineering (Knowledge & RAG Platform Engineering Lead).

Business: CTO Platforms (AI Platforms)

Job ID: 56078

Location: Guangzhou / Xi'an

Principal responsibilities

• Senior technical IC leadership for knowledge intelligence: Act as a hands-on senior technical expert in knowledge intelligence and knowledge management, shaping architecture, technical direction, and implementation approach for an enterprise-grade knowledge platform.
• Knowledge platform architecture & delivery ownership: Lead the design and build of scalable platform capabilities across ingestion, extraction, enrichment, classification, knowledge asset management, discovery, reuse, governance, and controlled downstream consumption.
• Industry best practice adoption & engineering standards: Evaluate knowledge management, knowledge engineering, ontology/taxonomy, graph, and AI-assisted curation practices, and translate them into engineering standards, reusable patterns, reference architectures, APIs/SDKs, and runbooks.
• Knowledge refinement & intelligence workflows: Lead workflows that extract, refine, summarize, classify, deduplicate, consolidate, and contextualize fragmented information into trusted, structured, traceable, and business-aligned knowledge assets.
• Knowledge graph & semantic layer leadership: Architect and evolve ontology/taxonomy management, entity/relation extraction, entity resolution, graph modeling, graph traversal, lineage-aware context assembly, and graph-based reasoning support for AI and search scenarios.
• Knowledge lifecycle, governance & self-checking: Establish mechanisms for ownership, validation, versioning, publishing, freshness monitoring, deprecation, retention, rollback, quality scoring, duplication/contradiction detection, and citation/provenance validation.
• Optimisation & operational readiness: Define SLOs/SLAs, observability, alerting, capacity planning, cost controls, incident response, troubleshooting playbooks, resilience patterns, and continuous production improvement for knowledge platform services.
• Cross-team influence & enablement: Partner with AI engineering, data platforms, cybersecurity, architecture, product, and domain SMEs to drive adoption, mentor engineers, review designs, unblock complex issues, and communicate trade-offs to senior stakeholders.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Management, Data Engineering, AI, or a related technical discipline; 7+ years of hands-on engineering experience in backend, data, AI, knowledge, search, or enterprise information platforms.
• Proven experience as a senior technical IC or platform technical lead, owning architecture, engineering standards, design review, implementation quality, optimisation, and production readiness for complex platform capabilities.
• Deep knowledge of knowledge intelligence and management practices, including taxonomy/ontology design, metadata standards, knowledge refinement, lifecycle management, governance, lineage, and enterprise content operations.
• Hands-on experience with knowledge graph, semantic search, RAG, agentic AI, or data enrichment systems, plus strong engineering foundations in distributed systems, APIs, data pipelines, observability, CI/CD, Docker, and Kubernetes.
• Strong security, compliance, production, and stakeholder mindset, with the ability to adopt industry best practices, mentor engineers, influence cross-functional teams, and apply AI-native approaches to improve quality, productivity, and decision-making.

You’ll achieve more when you join HSBC.

HSBC is an equal opportunity employer committed to building a culture where all employees are valued, respected and opinions count. We take pride in providing a workplace that fosters continuous professional development, flexible working and, opportunities to grow within an inclusive and diverse environment. We encourage applications from all suitably qualified persons irrespective of, but not limited to, their gender or genetic information, sexual orientation, ethnicity, religion, social status, medical care leave requirements, political affiliation, people with disabilities, color, national origin, veteran status, etc., We consider all applications based on merit and suitability to the role.

Personal data held by the Bank relating to employment applications will be used in accordance with our Privacy Statement, which is available on our website.

***Issued By HSBC Software Development (GuangDong) Limited***