Lead Engineer, Messaging Platform

Job Summary

As a Lead Engineer in the Messaging Platform team, you will drive the reliability, scalability, and performance of our distributed systems and cloud-native platforms. Your responsibilities include architecting resilient infrastructure, implementing robust monitoring and alerting solutions, and leading incident response and postmortem processes to ensure continuous improvement.

You will champion best practices in reliability engineering, automate operational tasks, and collaborate with platform teams to embed reliability into every stage of the software lifecycle. Your role involves mentoring junior engineers, managing technical debt, and ensuring compliance with industry standards for security, availability, and disaster recovery.

This position requires deep expertise in distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, observability, and automation. As a technical leader, you will bridge business requirements with innovative reliability solutions, foster a culture of engineering excellence, and ensure our platforms can scale and adapt to evolving organizational needs

Key Responsibilities

Strategy

• Understand the bank’s strategy and implementing Messaging Platform features to deliver the bank’s platform strategy.

Business

• This role will work alongside with our Messaging Platform team to build industry leading capabilities.

Processes

• Understand the bank’s software delivery processes and implement solutions in line with the bank’s compliance and security requirement.

People & Talent

• Work collaboratively with the Messaging Platform team to ensure stability & resilience of various platforms.
• Produce technical documentation and prepare training materials on the solutions being delivered and provide technical support.

Risk Management

• Understand bank’s risk management framework and embed that into the technology solution being delivered.

Governance

• Understand bank’s software delivery & quality assurance framework and assist in solutioning in respective governance activity.

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

• TSA Management
• Messaging Platform teams
• CIO Application teams
• Technology Assurance Owners
• Product Owners

Skills and Experience

The hard skills we are looking for include:

• 12+ years of experience working as a lead backend engineer/site reliability engineer.
• Strong communicator with experience in agile working environments.
• Strong knowledge of distributed systems concepts, protocols and APIs including TCP/IP, HTTP, AMQP, JMS, MQ, SOAP and experience in applying this knowledge for building resilient mission-critical systems.
• Deep experience with messaging brokers such as Solace or Kafka.
• Deep experience with integration technologies such as webMethods.
• Deep experience with Linux, scripting and networking.
• Deep experience with containers and container platform such as Podman, Docker and Kubernetes.
• Deep experience with observability tools including Grafana, Prometheus, ElasticSearch and OpenTelemetry standards.
• Deep experience in DevOps with exposure to CI/CD tools such as ADO, Git, Ansible.

The soft skills we are looking for include:

• Curiosity and eagerness to learn - proactive in self-education and applying new knowledge.
• Creative problem solving - resourceful, innovative, and able to think laterally.
• Big-picture perspective - considers maintainability, testability, usability, and performance.
• Positive and passionate attitude - focused on achieving solutions and driving results.
• Strong communication skills - able to explain, influence, listen, and clearly document ideas.
• Independent and self-motivated - capable of working and delivering without supervision.
• Disciplined approach - persistent in resolving issues and committed to delivering quality.

Role Specific Technical Competencies

• Site Reliability Engineering
• Messaging and Integration

Qualifications

• Education: Bachelor’s degree or above, major in computer science, software engineering, ICT, mathematics etc
• Training: Site Reliability Engineering
• Languages: English Proficiency

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.