Job Summary
This role could be based in India and China. When you start the application process you will be presented with a drop down menushowing all countries, please ensure that you select a country where the role is based
We are seeking a visionary and highly experienced senior leader to drive the evolution of artificial intelligence within our Financial Services division, serving critical markets in India and China. This pivotal role will act as the foundation of our AI Centre of Excellence (AI CoE), with direct ownership of Python-based AI platforms and advanced product development.
The successful candidate will be accountable for the end-to-end delivery of AI solutions, ensuring all developments meet the stringent regulatory, security, and ethical standards unique to the banking sector. Leading multidisciplinary teams, the role offers a unique opportunity to transition cutting-edge AI research and prototypes into high-quality, scalable, secure applications that provide measurable value and enhance operational efficiency. We are looking for a hands-on, strategic thinker with deep expertise in machine learning, software engineering, and governance of AI models.
Key Duties
• Develop and communicate an AI engineering vision aligned with the bank's strategy.
• Promote secure SDLC practices with architecture reviews, coding standards, documentation, and inner-source collaboration.
• Encourage a product-focused culture with transparent backlogs, fast iterations, and outcome-based KPIs.
• Build reusable Python backend systems with ReAct/Vue frontend and reference services.
• Lead AI development including LLMs, RAG, agent orchestration, prompt/version control, evaluation-as-code, and content moderation.
• Manage data workflows, feature/vector stores, retrieval pipelines, Text-to-SQL, and external integrations.
• Oversee API/event-driven architectures using REST, gRPC, FastAPI, Kafka, Pub/Sub, supporting microservices and React/TypeScript/Next.js frontends.
• Drive operational excellence in performance, cost, resilience, monitoring, and maintainability.
• Lead proofs of concept to production with change management, release governance, disaster recovery, capacity planning, and runbooks.
• Implement CI/CD with Azure DevOps for hybrid infrastructure deployments.
• Collaborate with risk and validation teams for evaluation checkpoints before and after launch.
• Manage data privacy, secret/access controls, data lineage, and compliance.
• Enforce security scanning, container signing, SBOM controls, data contracts, and audit trails.
• Lead safe-by-design AI initiatives with red-teaming, prompt-injection protection, evaluation suites, and incident response.
• Establish AI SRE practices: monitor golden signals, use OpenTelemetry, autoscaling, progressive delivery, shadow traffic, and rollback.
• Optimize runtime efficiency via token budgeting, caching, model distillation, and dynamic request routing.
Key Responsibilities
Strategic Leadership and Framework Development
- Drive the ongoing refinement and execution of AI Centre of Excellence strategy, ensuring synergy with overall corporate goals and regulatory requirements.
- Design and enforce comprehensive AI governance frameworks embedding principles of responsible AI, ethical design, fairness, transparency, and accountability in every phase from development to deployment and monitoring.
Operational Excellence and Risk Management
- End-to-end ownership of secure AI model build processes, deployment pipelines, and operational governance to guarantee system resilience, availability, and compliance in production environments.
- Implement dynamic and rigorous model risk controls, with continuous validation and interpretation workflows to proactively detect and mitigate potential risks in machine learning outputs.
Stakeholder Collaboration and Compliance
- Collaborate effectively with various business units, compliance teams, and technological stakeholders to ensure AI integrations enhance existing systems smoothly and compliantly.
- Advocate for and exemplify the Bank’s culture and values by enforcing the highest standards of ethics, regulatory compliance, and professional business conduct throughout AI-related initiatives.
People & Stakeholder Management:
- Recruit, develop, and mentor diverse, high-performing teams spanning backend engineering, data science, machine learning, and frontend development.
- Cultivate strategic partnerships with the Centre of Excellence CPO, Data Science, Chief Data Office, AI Platform, Security, Cloud, Data Platform teams, business lines, and authorised vendors, ensuring responsible management of open-source contributions and third-party services.
Skills and Experience
Technical Proficiencies
- Deep expertise in Python programming with a proven track record using machine learning and deep learning frameworks such as Scikit-learn, TensorFlow, PyTorch, and XGBoost.
- Comprehensive experience managing and optimising large-scale, production-grade data pipelines and analytics platforms within cloud and hybrid infrastructure environments.
- Strong competency in API design, development, and integration to facilitate effective AI model deployment and seamless operation inside enterprise ecosystems.
- Thorough understanding of software development risk management, AI model risk controls, and regulatory compliance to ensure secure, robust, and trustworthy AI solutions.
Professional Experience
- Minimum 15+ years of broad software engineering experience, including significant leadership roles focused on AI product development and delivery.
- Proven hands-on technical leadership encompassing approximately 60% full-stack software development combined with 40% focused AI platform or specialised product architecture and construction.
Qualifications
Educational Requirements
- A bachelor’s degree or higher qualification in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Mathematics, Data Science, or a closely related quantitative discipline from an accredited university or institution.
Language Proficiency
- Fluent English communication skills, both written and verbal, are essential to engage and liaise successfully with diverse global teams, leadership, regulators, and external partners.
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.
