Engineering Lead

Job Summary

The Engineering Lead will provide end-to-end technical leadership for AI-enabled products and capabilities across WRB. The role is accountable for solution architecture, engineering delivery, governance and production readiness, ensuring that AI solutions are secure, scalable, explainable, observable and aligned with the Bank’s technology, risk, Responsible AI and regulatory standards. The role will collaborate across product, engineering, architecture, data, platform, risk and partner teams to deliver sustainable business and customer outcomes.

Key Responsibilities

• Deliver solution intent and application designs, produce clear and comprehensive design and solution intent documents.
• Support business in appropriate sequencing of the backlog, refinement, and rationalization through a technical lens.
• Oversee the implementation of microservices architecture where applicable
• Design APIs and ensure they are secure, scalable, and well-documented according to standards
• Manage and mitigate technical risks in the delivery.
• Present Solutions to the architecture review forum.
• Align with technology architects on the target solution design to minimize technical debt.
• Align technical solutions and the applications with established security control requirements, ensuring compliance and risk mitigation to avoid potential penalties
• Collaborate with Security Champions to identify and implement the necessary security controls tailored to the specific delivery or process. Identify Applicable Security controls by engaging with Security Champion
• Drive adoption of AI-assisted software engineering practices, including AI-powered development, testing, code review, documentation generation, and release automation.
• Establish reusable AI architecture standards, reference implementations, and engineering guardrails to accelerate delivery across teams.
• Define AI solution architecture and target-state designs, ensuring alignment with enterprise architecture principles, security requirements, and business objectives.
• Own the end-to-end engineering lifecycle for AI-enabled solutions, from technical feasibility and design through implementation, testing, deployment, operational readiness and ongoing service ownership.
• Lead AI product and platform engineering across model integration, orchestration, grounding, retrieval, context and state management, evaluation, guardrails, observability and auditability.
• Define measurable AI acceptance criteria covering accuracy, groundedness, unsupported outputs, safety, traceability, tool use, latency, reliability and business suitability.
• Ensure AI solutions integrate with enterprise platforms, data and business systems through secure, reusable and well-governed patterns.
• Own production readiness for AI services, including resilience, capacity, performance, monitoring, incident management, support models, runbooks, recovery and operational acceptance.
• Govern technology partners and vendors across scope, technical dependencies, deliverable acceptance, code ownership, documentation, knowledge transfer and handover.

Business

• Develop and drive application strategy and roadmap in collaboration with the Domain Tech Lead.
• Develop and maintain the AI engineering roadmap, aligned with enterprise AI strategy, reusable platform capabilities, target architecture and technical-debt priorities.

Processes

• Regularly reviews squad metrics in regards to Predictability, Quality, Squad Sentiment and supports the team to better value delivery.
• Work with chapters to promote quality engineering, technical craftsmanship and drive solution standardization and service reusability.
• Establish AI engineering lifecycle practices covering automated evaluation, controlled model, prompt and configuration changes, regression testing, production monitoring and feedback-driven improvement.

People & Talent

• Contribute to technical innovation and share knowledge within the engineering community.
• Stay updated on emerging technologies, lead internal workshops and seminars, encourage team participation in innovation initiatives
• Provide technical mentoring, uplift AI engineering capability and influence engineering standards across squads and the wider engineering community.

Governance

• Comply with System Delivery controls and attest for it with every (technical) release to production
• The controls cover: Requirements, Architecture (see Architecture Review Forum below), Security (see Cyber Security Services below), Development, Testing, IT Resilience, Service Level Management, Tech Operations & Support, Release Management, SW Configuration Management
• Ensure compliance with Responsible AI, model governance, data usage, explainability, human oversight and AI risk-assessment requirements, retaining evidence for audit and approval.
• Apply AI-specific security controls covering identity propagation, least-privilege access, sensitive-data handling, prompt and response protection, secure model and tool access, secrets management and misuse prevention.

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, including regulatory and business conduct, across Standard Chartered Bank. This includes understanding and ensuring compliance with, in letter and spirit, all applicable laws, regulations, guidelines and the Group Code of Conduct.
• Effectively and collaboratively identify, escalate, mitigate and resolve risk, conduct and compliance matters.

Key stakeholders

• Product Owners; Domain Technology Leads; Architects; Engineering Squads; Data and AI Platform Teams; Cyber Security; Responsible AI; Model Risk; Compliance; Technology Operations; and Technology Partners.

Skills and Experience

• Enterprise AI and agentic solution architecture; LLM integration; orchestration; retrieval-augmented generation; context and state management
• Agile product delivery and cross-functional engineering leadership
• Cloud-native AI engineering and architecture
• Python and Java backend engineering; REST APIs; data and integration engineering
• AI evaluation, observability, traceability and operational monitoring
• DevSecOps, automated delivery, identity, security and data governance
• Experience delivering secure, explainable, traceable and human-governed AI solutions, preferably in banking or another regulated industry.
• AI Solution Architecture
• Software Engineering
• Cloud Engineering
• Security and Risk Management
• Data and Integration Engineering
• DevSecOps and Operational Resilience

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.