Sr. Associate Director, Software Engineering

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 SR. ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR, SOFTWARE ENGINEERING.

Business:IWPB Technology

Principal responsibilities

• Lead end-to-end engineering delivery for lending products/platform capabilities, from discovery through build, release, and production support (APIs, backend services, data, background processing, and operational tooling).
• Bring a strong business/product mindset: understand customer and business outcomes, challenge requirements constructively, propose product/technical options, and shape solutions that balance value, time-to-market, risk, and cost.
• Translate business requirements into architecture and technical direction, working closely with Product Owners, BAs, QA, SRE/Operations, and Risk/Compliance partners.
• Design modern cloud-first architectures (microservices/event-driven where appropriate) with clear trade-offs, focusing on maintainability, security-by-design, and operational simplicity.
• Own performance engineering: define NFRs, run performance analysis, identify bottlenecks, and drive performance tuning across application, database, messaging, and infrastructure.
• Build for extreme resilience: design and implement robust patterns such as timeouts, retries with backoff, circuit breakers, bulkheads, rate limiting, idempotency, graceful degradation, and strong fallback strategies.
• Engineer production-ready services with deep observability: structured logging, metrics, tracing, dashboards, alerting, and SLO-oriented monitoring; ensure self-diagnosis and “self-issue reporting” patterns where feasible.
• Drive cost-effective delivery: make pragmatic technology choices, optimise cloud and runtime costs, right-size services, reduce waste, and continually improve cost-to-serve (FinOps mindset).
• Ensure operational excellence end-to-end including: housekeeping (data retention, archiving, cleanup jobs), scaling strategies, capacity planning, DR considerations, and production readiness reviews.
• Own incident learning loops: lead RCA, implement preventative controls, and reduce repeat incidents through reliability improvements and automation.
• Lead engineering practices and standards: coding quality, security, architecture guardrails, documentation, and mentoring/coaching across the team.
• Support modernisation (monolith-to-microservices where justified, platform upgrades, API standardisation, data/event-driven patterns) with measurable outcomes.

Requirements

• Strong product/engineering leadership: able to influence priorities, propose solution options, and align stakeholders on trade-offs (scope/cost/risk/time).
• Cost mindset / value engineering: demonstrated ability to deliver outcomes with cost control (cloud cost optimisation, licensing/runtime trade-offs, reducing operational overhead).
• Modern architecture capability: hands-on experience designing cloud-ready systems with clear NFR ownership (performance, resilience, scalability, security).
• Strong hands-on Java experience (Java 11+; Java 17 preferred) building enterprise-grade services and APIs.
• Spring ecosystem (Spring Boot, Spring MVC/WebFlux, Spring Security) and API design (REST, OpenAPI/Swagger; versioning/backward compatibility).
• Microservices and distributed systems patterns: service decomposition, configuration, resiliency patterns, idempotency, consistency models, and safe evolutionary design.
• Performance engineering experience: profiling, load testing strategy, latency/throughput tuning, JVM tuning basics, database query optimisation, and capacity planning.
• Database experience: SQL (Oracle/PostgreSQL) and strong understanding of transactions, locking, indexing, and data modelling.
• Messaging/eventing: Kafka and/or MQ; delivery semantics (at-least-once/exactly-once concepts), ordering, retries, DLQs, and replay strategies.
• CI/CD and engineering excellence: Git, Maven/Gradle, pipeline automation (Jenkins/GitLab), containerisation (Docker), automated testing (unit/integration/contract).
• Security-by-design: OAuth2/OIDC, JWT, secrets management, OWASP awareness, secure coding and threat-aware design.
• Banking backend/core banking understanding and ability to work within risk/compliance constraints.
• Strong communication and stakeholder management in global, cross-functional environments; can explain technical decisions in business terms.
• Delivers production features with strong test coverage and clean, maintainable code.
• Improves service reliability, resilience, and observability, reducing recurring incidents and MTTR.
• Improves performance and scalability against agreed NFRs/SLOs.
• Drives cost-to-serve improvements (reduced cloud spend, reduced operational effort, simpler architectures).
• Builds trusted relationships with product and operational stakeholders; raises engineering maturity across the team.
• Accountability: owns outcomes, not just outputs; ensures production readiness and operational stability.
• Collaboration: works across technology, product, operations, and control functions to deliver shared goals.
• Inclusion: values different perspectives and builds an inclusive environment.
• Execution: pragmatic, delivery-focused, balances speed with risk and quality.

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.

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