Job Summary

The FI clearing business underpins all of the Group’s operations. In scope is the ownership of one or more pillar that comes under FI Clearing Hive to support the FI clearing business of all USD, EUR, GBP and JPY currency transactions. This is a Group critical application suite requiring the delivery of constant service with reputational and regulatory implications to the Group should any failure in service arise, along with a constant level of change and functional uplift.

Join our Financial Institution (FI) Clearing team as a Lead Site Reliability Engineer to deliver scalable, resilient, and fault-tolerant payment solutions. This role requires a multi-competency skill set, encompassing vendor management, architecture, full-stack engineering, and business solutions with a focus on part of a 24/7 production engineering team. You will drive the end-to-end technology strategy in collaboration with the Development, Cash Product and COO teams, ensuring stability and scalability.

Key Responsibilities:

System Reliability & Operations:
•    Ensure the reliability, availability, and performance of Realtime Payment Processing System (RTPS) - ACI Worldwide’s MTS and UPF platforms in a 24/7 production environment. 
•    Perform daily health checks of applications and processes, resolving operational issues by collaborating with end users, CIO teams (developers), and infrastructure teams.
•    Lead incident response, root cause analysis, and defect resolution, ensuring systematic communication to stakeholders and minimal downtime.
•    Own the observability platform (e.g., Prometheus, ELK, Grafana) for proactive monitoring and risk escalation.

Technology Strategy:
•    Formulate and deliver an end-to-end technology strategy with the Cash Product and COO teams, balancing client experience, time-to-market, stability, resilience, scalability, cost efficiency, and innovative work practices.
•    Identify and implement System Improvement Plans (SIPs) to automate manual tasks, optimize batch processes, and enhance performance/throughput for operational efficiency and cost savings.

Risk Management:
•    Address operational queries, incidents, and upstream/downstream system issues, ensuring rigorous risk management and compliance with Technology GRC (Governance, Risk, and Compliance) standards.
•    Maintain detailed knowledge of relevant laws, regulations, industry trends, and security best practices.

Team Leadership & Collaboration:
•    Manage a 24/7 production engineering team, fostering a collaborative environment that promotes creativity, innovation, and high performance.
•    Act as a bridge between Development, Operations, and Business teams, ensuring seamless communication and alignment.
•    Serve as the focal point for disseminating information between management and the team, attending technology and business working committees.
•    Mentor team members, nurturing their strengths to enhance team capabilities and maintain high professionalism standards

Vendor & Stakeholder Management:

•    Manage Service Level Agreements (SLAs) with internal teams, external clearing houses (e.g., CHAPS, Target, CHIPS, Fedwire, ACH, LCH), and third-party vendors. Build strategic alliances and maintain successful stakeholder relationships, leveraging international exposure and cultural diversity.

Skills and Experience

• 7+ years of experience 
• Be open to take late shifts between 1pm and 9pm local time once a week.
• Be open to take a weekend shift once a month.
• Assess experience managing 24/7 teams, handling high-critical incidents, and stakeholder communication.
• Experience in site reliability engineering or Production support with hands-on expertise in ACI Worldwide MTS and UPF platforms or similar products from FIS, Finastra, or Volante
• Functional knowledge of payment processing applications, including high-value and low-value payments (e.g., SEPA, SEPAInst, Faster Payments, BACS).
• Proficiency in SWIFT Messaging (ISO 20022, SWIFTNet Link, SWIFT Alliance Gateway, SWIFT Alliance Messaging Hub).
• Experience with integration to clearing houses (CHAPS, Target, CHIPS, Fedwire, ACH, LCH).
• Strong skills in UNIX/Linux (AIX), IBM MQ, Solace, Apache Kafka, and database management (SQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL).
• Expertise in monitoring tools (Prometheus, ITRS Geneos, Prognosis, ELK, Grafana) and automation tools (Ansible, Control-M).
• Knowledge of web application servers (JBoss, Apache) and scripting languages (Python, Bash, SQL).
• EDUCATION     A BACHELOR'S DEGREE OR MASTERS IN COMPUTER SCIENCE (CS) OR INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY (IT)
• TRAINING     
  • ITIL 
  • DEVOPS
  • SRE
• LANGUAGES    
  • PYTHON, BASH, SQL

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

Expected annual base pay range for the role is 154,020 USD to 231,020 USD. The final offer will be determined on an individualised basis using a number of variables, including but not limited to skill set, depth of experience and education, internal relativity, and specific work location. At Standard Chartered Bank, Base pay is only part of the total compensation package. Discretionary variable pay and a range of attractive bank sponsored benefit programs are available and designed to foster employee overall health and well-being including, but not limited to, a best in class 401k plan with up to 8% employer match, robust medical plan coverage with employer funded Health Savings Accounts, inclusive family building benefits, and flexible/hybrid working arrangements for many of our positions subject to role specific considerations

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