Director, AI Architecture

Job Summary

The Director, AI Architecture is accountable for defining and governing the Bank's enterprise AI platform architecture. This role owns the foundational technology stack that enables AI adoption at scale, including the execution substrate, control plane, model serving infrastructure, and underlying data architecture.

The role holder will establish enterprise standards, architectural principles, and governance frameworks that enable secure, scalable, resilient, and compliant deployment of AI capabilities across the Bank. The individual will work across business, technology, data, cybersecurity, risk, and engineering teams to create a reusable AI platform that supports agentic systems, generative AI, machine learning, and future intelligent automation capabilities.

The successful candidate will be a recognized technical authority with deep expertise in distributed systems, data architecture, AI platform engineering, and enterprise governance within highly regulated environments.

Key Responsibilities

Strategy

• Define and drive the Bank's long-term AI platform strategy, architecture vision, and technology roadmap.
• Establish enterprise architecture standards, patterns, and reusable frameworks for AI platform adoption.
• Shape the evolution of the Bank's agentic AI ecosystem, ensuring scalability, resilience, governance, and regulatory compliance.
• Advise senior executives and technology leadership on strategic AI platform investments and architectural decisions.
• Drive technology standardization while balancing innovation, operational efficiency, and risk management.

Business

• Act as the principal architect for the Bank's enterprise AI platform.
• Define and govern platform interfaces, service boundaries, data contracts, and operational controls.
• Lead architecture reviews and design authority forums for AI-related initiatives.
• Collaborate with engineering, data, infrastructure, cybersecurity, and risk teams to deliver scalable AI services.
• Support adoption of AI capabilities across business functions through reusable platform services and reference architectures.
• Drive multi-provider AI model strategies that optimize performance, resilience, portability, and cost.

Processes

• Design and govern distributed execution architectures supporting agentic and AI-enabled workloads.
• Establish standards for orchestration, durable workflows, agent state management, and tool integration.
• Define enterprise approaches for model deployment, evaluation, observability, monitoring, and lifecycle management.
• Create canonical data models and semantic layers across heterogeneous enterprise data domains.
• Govern architecture decisions relating to lakehouse platforms, object storage, graph databases, vector stores, and NoSQL technologies.
• Lead architecture decision record (ADR) development and architecture review board submissions.

People & Talent

• Provide technical leadership and mentorship across architecture, engineering, and data teams.
• Develop architectural capability within the organization through coaching, standards, and knowledge sharing.
• Influence technology direction across teams without direct reporting authority.
• Foster a culture of engineering excellence, innovation, and architectural discipline.

Risk Management

• Ensure AI platform architecture aligns with enterprise risk management frameworks.

• Embed security, privacy, auditability, explainability, and resiliency principles into platform design.
• Define controls supporting sovereign deployment requirements and data localization obligations.
• Drive architecture patterns that mitigate operational, technology, cyber, and model risks.

Governance

• Establish and enforce enterprise-wide architecture standards for AI systems.
• Drive governance frameworks covering identity, authorization, tool access, routing, audit, and usage controls.
• Partner with Risk, Compliance, Legal, and Information Security teams to ensure regulatory compliance.
• Provide evidence and architectural assurance for internal governance and regulatory reviews.

Regulatory & Business Conduct

• Display exemplary conduct and live by the Group's Values and Code of Conduct.
• Take personal responsibility for embedding the highest standards of ethics, regulatory compliance, and business conduct across Standard Chartered Bank.
• Ensure compliance with all applicable laws, regulations, internal policies, and technology governance requirements.
• Effectively identify, assess, escalate, mitigate, and resolve risk, conduct, and compliance matters associated with AI platforms and services.

Our Ideal Candidate

• 15+ years of experience in software engineering, platform architecture, data architecture, or distributed systems engineering, with a strong track record of building enterprise-scale platforms.
• Proven experience designing and evolving enterprise platforms that support multiple engineering teams and business domains.
• Deep expertise in distributed systems, including execution models, state management, consistency, concurrency, resiliency, and failure recovery.
• Strong experience defining enterprise architecture standards, technology roadmaps, and governance frameworks within large, federated organisations.
• Expertise in control plane architecture, including identity, authorisation, policy enforcement, routing, auditability, and delegated machine-to-machine access controls.
• Experience designing canonical data models, ontologies, taxonomies, semantic frameworks, knowledge graphs, RDF models, or property graph architectures.
• Experience architecting large-scale data platforms leveraging lakehouse architectures, object storage, graph databases, vector databases, and NoSQL technologies.
• Strong understanding of AI platform engineering, model serving infrastructure, LLM deployment, retrieval architectures, observability, evaluation, and governance.
• Experience with agentic systems, orchestration frameworks, durable execution, agent state management, and tool integration patterns.
• Experience operating in regulated environments where security, privacy, compliance, auditability, and operational resilience drive architectural decisions.
• Ability to influence technology strategy, establish enterprise standards, and drive adoption across teams and functions.
• Degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems, Data Engineering, or a related discipline. Experience within banking, financial services, or regulated industries provides additional value.

Role Specific Technical Competencies

• Enterprise AI Platform Architecture
• Distributed Systems Architecture
• AI Control Plane Design & Governance
• Identity, Authorization & Security Architecture
• Agentic Systems & Orchestration Frameworks
• Data Architecture & Semantic Modelling
• Knowledge Graphs, RDF & Ontologies
• Lakehouse & Data Platform Architecture
• Vector Database & Retrieval Architecture
• Graph Database Architecture
• Enterprise API & Service Architecture
• Model Serving & LLM Operations
• Multi-Cloud Architecture (Azure/AWS)
• Kubernetes & Platform Engineering
• Technology Governance & Architecture Assurance
• Technical Writing & Executive Communication

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.

Recruitment Assessments

Some of our roles use assessments to help us understand how suitable you are for the role you've applied to. If you are invited to take an assessment, this is great news. It means your application has progressed to an important stage of our recruitment process.

Visit our careers website www.sc.com/careers