Job Summary

As an Associate Vice President within Production Engineering at Standard Chartered, you will spearhead the evolution of our support operations by transitioning traditional methods into a highly efficient Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) framework. This role demands adept management of multiple stakeholder expectations while upholding superior quality and timely delivery of operational support across a dynamic digital landscape.

You will lead a team of experienced SRE engineers, championing automation initiatives and driving the implementation of self-healing mechanisms for critical applications. The role requires a sharp focus on client-centric monitoring and observability solutions finely tuned to end-user needs, ensuring service excellence aligned with stringent Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and Operational Level Agreements (OLAs).

Maintaining an optimal balance between rapid change velocity and system stability by effectively managing an error budget will form a core part of your responsibilities. You will play a pivotal role in embedding disciplined incident management practices, which include conducting blameless post-mortems and systematically addressing root causes to reduce recurring incidents and their impact on business operations.

Your engagement will extend into coordinating with cross-functional Scrum teams to communicate and prioritize remediation actions identified from postmortems and problem tickets. Additionally, you will oversee cyber risk, resilience risk, and system stability, ensuring the deployment of timely security patches across production and non-production environments.

Collaborating closely with Development Leads, Test Leads, and Architects, you will influence strategic directions concerning application supportability while independently researching and deploying new technologies that align with the bank’s evolving strategy. Documentation and dissemination of standards and procedures to uphold consistent operational excellence will also be under your purview.

This role operates within a 24/7 on-call working environment, requiring flexibility and resilience to meet the demands of supporting mission-critical banking operations.

Key Responsibilities

Your key responsibilities will center around managing and executing a large-scale site reliability program focused on supporting specific business streams. This entails driving numerous development and optimization initiatives designed to enhance service reliability, scalability, and performance within the banking ecosystem.

• Identify and champion optimization opportunities across cloud deployments, ensuring all activities are seamlessly automated to promote operational efficiency.
• Lead the Change Approval Board, meticulously reviewing all change requests to ensure smooth, error-free production deployments.
• Continuously assess and improve monitoring and observability frameworks, aligning with evolving business demands and technology landscapes.
• Initiate and manage application optimization and service improvement plans that fortify system stability and align with risk management objectives.

Strategic Responsibilities:

• Serve as the domain specialist within the core banking team, offering expertise that enhances product functionality and supports their rollout with a focus on scalability and reliability.
• Act as a liaison bridging end users and internal Core Banking teams, translating user stories into tangible development outputs.
• Contribute actively to the lifecycle management of core banking products, encompassing both product and release management activities.

Through these responsibilities, you will underpin the bank’s commitment to delivering resilient and secure digital banking experiences.

Business
•    Participate fitment workshops, Understand  product requirements from PO and Solution Architect and review  the product requirements.
•     Preparation of Program Specifications  for capabilities identified for optimisation based on  analysis.
•    Management of changes to the core banking products to ensure that changes are in line with product and release plans.
•    Maintain issues tracker and Identity RCA for permanent closure of issues.
•    Lead a team of Developers/Senior Developers and guide them in various activities like System Improvements, Monitorings and Dashboards
•    Implementation and Post Implementation support.

Processes
•    Maintenance and management of improvement capability and other applicable audit documents as per process.   Follow standard Change, Problem Management Process

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
•    Retail Banking, T&I and Country Business

Skills and Experience

The ideal candidate will possess a robust blend of technical expertise and leadership skills necessary to excel in a demanding SRE role within a complex banking environment. Key skills and experience include:

• Strong programming skills in development languages and scripting tools such as Shell, ANT, and database scripting to automate operational workflows.
• Profound understanding of design principles and architectural patterns facilitating scalable and reliable system design.
• Hands-on experience with various operating systems, unit testing methodologies, and intricate database management and integration techniques.
• Expertise with infrastructure management, software configuration management systems, and development toolkits that enhance productivity.
• Proficiency in support system interfaces and adherence to rigorous process standards, complemented by sound application domain knowledge and detailed system documentation practices.
• Advanced analytical and problem-solving abilities enabling effective incident resolution and continuous service improvement.
• Exceptional communication skills fostering clear knowledge transfer, collaborative teamwork, and effective stakeholder engagement.
• Strong organisational capabilities combined with excellent judgment and decision-making aptitude to navigate ambiguous situations effectively.
• Comprehensive understanding of group-wide policies and processes ensuring compliance and operational consistency.

Qualifications

Educational Background:

• Essential: A graduate degree in a relevant field.
• Desirable: Professional qualifications including but not limited to Bachelor or Master of Engineering, or postgraduate degrees with a focus on computer science or related disciplines.

Sector Expertise:

• Demonstrated technical, functional, and domain expertise within Wholesale or Consumer Banking sectors.
• Experience with banking product development and understanding of corresponding business processes is highly preferred.
• Exposure to data migration projects and database technologies is advantageous.

Technical Proficiencies:

Primary:

• Proficient with JBOSS, Java, J2EE, Spring Boot, and Spring frameworks.
• Experienced with application performance monitoring tools such as ITRS, AppDynamics, and CloudWatch.
• Hands-on with AWS platform services including Aurora database, alongside Restful APIs, Kong Gateway, and OAuth security protocols.
• Familiar with DevOps tools such as Maven, Jenkins, SonarQube, Rundeck, Ansible, and Groovy scripting.

Secondary:

• Knowledge of container orchestration and virtualization technologies like OpenShift, Docker, and Kubernetes.
• Experience with messaging systems including Hazlecast, Kafka, and RabbitMQ.
• Familiarity with testing and vulnerability assessment tools like AppScan, Selenium, Cucumber, CA Lisa, and JMeter.

Experience: A minimum of 12 to 15 years’ relevant industry experience in technology and banking domains.

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.