AVP, Engineering Lead, WRB Tech

Job Summary

The Engineering Lead is a senior technology delivery professional responsible for driving the successful end-to-end delivery of complex products and features. This role provides technical leadership across multiple squads, ensures engineering excellence, and partners closely with Product, Architecture, and Business stakeholders to meet strategic outcomes.

Key Responsibilities

Strategy

• Lead and support the formulation of technology strategy across the product domain, ensuring alignment with enterprise architecture and business priorities
• Drive ownership of the product-suite strategy alongside Product Owners and Business stakeholders, ensuring prioritization and alignment with delivery outcomes
• Shape technology roadmaps, architectural direction, and long-term engineering plans to support sustainable delivery
• Oversee and contribute to budgeting, demand planning, and resource forecasting for engineering needs, ensuring transparent reporting and trade-off discussions
• Ensure consistency of solutions within the domain and alignment to broader enterprise technology standards

Business

• Champion engineering excellence and implement best-practice delivery methods across squads, ensuring predictable and high-quality outcomes
• Partner with Business, Product, and Architecture leads to translate business needs into feasible delivery plans and scalable technical solutions
• Promote an environment of innovation, encouraging teams to leverage modern engineering patterns and tools to solve business challenges
• Drive continuous improvement initiatives across engineering practices, delivery processes, and technical operations
• Ensure solutions adhere to enterprise architecture standards and support long-term technology sustainability
• Foster strong cross-functional collaboration, providing leadership that reinforces accountability, ownership, and engineering craftsmanship

Process

• Oversee and continuously refine engineering processes to ensure efficient, predictable, and transparent delivery across all squads
• Enable timely and quality delivery of releases by ensuring disciplined sprint planning, dependency management, and effective removal of blockers
• Drive adoption of standardized eSDLC practices and ensure compliance with architectural, security, and operational guidelines
• Identify and implement improvements in engineering effectiveness, tooling, automation, and ways of working to maximize squad efficiency
• Ensure accurate and timely reporting of delivery metrics, risks, and outcomes to stakeholders
• Manage relationships and performance of technology vendors, ensuring value and alignment to engineering expectations
• Promote best practices in data management and governance to support reliable product delivery
• Guides engineering quality by defining evaluation criteria, enforcing best-practice AI tooling, and validating technical user stories, fixes, and core functionality enhancements.

People & Talent

• Take on Chapter Leadership as an active practitioner in the craft of the Chapter that they lead, i.e., has full accountability to the growth of the Chapter, and not solely a line management responsibility.
• Provide strong leadership to engineering teams, fostering a culture of accountability, ownership, and high performance
• Actively engage in mentoring and capability uplift, strengthening technical skills, delivery discipline, and career development across squads
• Support hiring, onboarding, and talent development to build a resilient and skilled engineering workforce
• Promote a safe, inclusive, and collaborative environment, enabling teams to innovate and deliver their best work
• Ensure engineering teams adhere to craftsmanship principles and maintain high standards of code quality, testing, and design
• Optimizes AI knowledge reuse and consumption by identifying reusable capabilities and uplifting engineering skills across the hive.

Risk Management

• Identify, manage, and mitigate delivery risks and issues proactively, ensuring timely escalation and resolution
• Ensure squads adopt appropriate testing, code reviews, security controls, and architecture governance practices
• Maintain strict adherence to eSDLC processes, ensuring high-quality engineering outputs and predictable delivery
• Promote safe delivery through proper documentation, change management, and quality assurance practices

Governance

• Address tech compliance (ESDLC) requirements through the delivery lifecycle (design reviews, security reviews, SAT, OAT, etc.) with support from HTL(Hive Tech Lead) / PO / CPO (Chief Product Owner)
• Ensure compliance with regulatory, operational, and enterprise governance standards across all engineering work
• Support audits, oversight reviews, and risk committees with accurate and timely reporting
• Drive adherence to engineering governance frameworks, including architecture governance, risk controls, security requirements, and delivery standards
• Contribute to and participate in governance forums to represent engineering delivery health, risks, and strategic needs
• Evaluates & refines AI-generated requirements / technical artefacts, ensuring strategic alignment, feasibility, & adherence to standards.

Skills and Experience

• 10+ years experinece in software engineering
• Java & Back-end Engineering Strong hands-on Java engineering experience, with a solid understanding of modern Java, Spring/Spring Boot, concurrency, application performance, dependency management, and building maintainable enterprise back-end services.
• API & Service Development Strong experience designing, building and evolving REST APIs and service-based architectures. Able to make good decisions around API contracts, versioning, authentication and authorisation, error handling, idempotency, resilience, observability and backward compatibility.
• Database Engineering Strong relational database fundamentals, including data modelling, SQL, transactions, indexing, query optimisation and performance troubleshooting. Experience with PostgreSQL and/or Oracle is preferred, but strong experience with comparable enterprise relational databases is acceptable.
• Systems Design & Architecture Able to design scalable, resilient and secure distributed systems, and reason about service boundaries, integration patterns, synchronous versus asynchronous processing, caching, failure handling, high availability and performance.
• Security Engineering Fundamentals Strong understanding of secure application development, particularly API security, authentication and authorisation, encryption, secrets management, dependency vulnerabilities and common application/API security risks such as the OWASP Top 10.
• Engineering Quality & Testing Strong understanding of automated testing across unit, integration, contract and end-to-end levels, with the ability to establish appropriate quality controls within CI/CD pipelines.
• DevOps & Production Engineering Practical experience with CI/CD, containers, deployment automation, monitoring, logging and troubleshooting production services. Able to design software with operability and production resilience in mind.
• AI-Augmented Engineering & Problem Solving Able to use AI-assisted engineering tools effectively for software development, analysis, troubleshooting, testing and documentation. Understands prompt and context engineering sufficiently to provide AI tools with the right code, architecture, constraints and engineering context, while critically validating their output.
• Critical Technical Thinking Able to challenge assumptions, work through ambiguous technical problems, evaluate alternative approaches and make sound engineering decisions based on evidence, risk and trade-offs.

Additional Skills

Other Technical Skills

• Event-driven and asynchronous architectures, messaging and integration patterns
• Containerisation and Kubernetes
• Cloud-native engineering
• Observability and application performance management
• Network fundamentals, particularly HTTP/TLS, DNS, proxies, load balancing and connectivity troubleshooting
• Web and application security

Human Skills

• Sets engineering direction, raises technical standards, reviews designs and code, mentors engineers, and remains sufficiently hands-on to guide teams through complex engineering problems.
• Grows Self (Everyone)
• Continuously develops engineering and leadership capability.
• Grows Others (People Leaders)
• Coaches engineers, builds capability and creates strong engineering ownership within the team.
• Grows Bank (Enterprise Leaders)
• Makes technology decisions with an enterprise perspective, balancing delivery, sustainability, security, risk and reuse.

About Standard Chartered

We're an international bank, nimble enough to act, big enough for impact. For more than 170 years, we've worked to make a positive difference for our clients, communities, and each other. We question the status quo, love a challenge and enjoy finding new opportunities to grow and do better than before. If you're looking for a career with purpose and you want to work for a bank making a difference, we want to hear from you. You can count on us to celebrate your unique talents and we can't wait to see the talents you can bring us.

Our purpose, to drive commerce and prosperity through our unique diversity, together with our brand promise, to be here for good are achieved by how we each live our valued behaviours. When you work with us, you'll see how we value difference and advocate inclusion.

Together we:

• Do the right thing and are assertive, challenge one another, and live with integrity, while putting the client at the heart of what we do
• Never settle, continuously striving to improve and innovate, keeping things simple and learning from doing well, and not so well
• Are better together, we can be ourselves, be inclusive, see more good in others, and work collectively to build for the long term

What we offer

In line with our Fair Pay Charter, we offer a competitive salary and benefits to support your mental, physical, financial and social wellbeing.

• Core bank funding for retirement savings, medical and life insurance, with flexible and voluntary benefits available in some locations.
• Time-off including annual leave, parental/maternity (20 weeks), sabbatical (12 months maximum) and volunteering leave (3 days), along with minimum global standards for annual and public holiday, which is combined to 30 days minimum.
• Flexible working options based around home and office locations, with flexible working patterns.
• Proactive wellbeing support through Unmind, a market-leading digital wellbeing platform, development courses for resilience and other human skills, global Employee Assistance Programme, sick leave, mental health first-aiders and all sorts of self-help toolkits
• A continuous learning culture to support your growth, with opportunities to reskill and upskill and access to physical, virtual and digital learning.
• Being part of an inclusive and values driven organisation, one that embraces and celebrates our unique diversity, across our teams, business functions and geographies - everyone feels respected and can realise their full potential.