Job Summary

This role could be based in Singapore and India. When you start the application process you will be presented with a drop down menu showing all countries, Please ensure that you select a country where the role is based.

Head of Payments Platforms will be the chief engineer and leader for Standard Chartered’s core payment engines. He/she will lead an engineering division of engineers responsible for building, modernising, and scaling high-availability, high-throughput payment execution engines across our global footprint, ensuring uninterrupted operations within strict regulatory resilience frameworks. This end-to-end responsibility includes core engines, direct debits, clearing gateways, adaptors, global routers, and integration services. 

•    Core Execution Architecture: Drive the technical vision, scale, and performance for core clearing engines, high-concurrency payment gateways, real-time transaction processing systems, and automated ledger entries.
•    Corridor Scale & Latency: Engineer resilient, idempotent, low-latency execution engines capable of processing millions of cross-border and domestic payments daily across complex G-SIB corridors within critical cut off schedules and payment windows.
•    Resilience, SRE & Telemetry: Guarantee maximum operational stability, near-zero downtime, and fault tolerance across execution pipelines. Own global transaction telemetry, and adherence to regulatory resilience standards (e.g., DORA, CPS 230) and strict RTO targets.
•    Legacy Modernisation: Lead the architectural evolution from legacy transaction engines to modern, distributed engines without impacting live payment corridors.
•    People Management: Direct, mentor, and scale an engineering organisation of engineers. 

Key Responsibilities

Strategy
•    Execute the Payments technology strategy defined by the CIO Payments and translate it into an actionable platform engineering roadmap.
•    Define and continuously evolve the target-state architecture for core payment execution capabilities, including transaction processing, clearing, settlement, payment gateways and ledger platforms.
•    Drive modernization of payment transaction engines, messaging layers, workflow orchestration and execution services while ensuring uninterrupted client and business operations.
•    Lead engineering decisions that improve scalability, resilience, performance, security and maintainability of the Payments platform estate.
•    Partner with Architecture, Engineering and Product stakeholders to ensure platform designs align with the broader Payments and enterprise technology strategy.
•    Develop technology roadmaps for platform simplification, technical debt reduction, observability, automation and resilience improvements.
•    Identify emerging technology opportunities and engineering innovations that support future payment volumes, new payment schemes and evolving client requirements.

Business
•    Deliver and operate the strategic payment platform capabilities required to support the Bank's domestic, cross-border and real-time payments business.
•    Partner with Transaction Banking, Cash Operations, Product, Architecture and Engineering teams to ensure platform capabilities support business growth and client outcomes.
•    Own platform performance, transaction throughput, latency, availability and service quality across critical payment corridors.
•    Support delivery of new payment products, market initiatives, regulatory changes and payment network requirements.
•    Lead engineering execution for strategic payments programmes, market migrations and platform consolidation initiatives.
•    Ensure platform capabilities support operational efficiency, straight-through-processing, resiliency and improved client experience.
•    Provide technology leadership and subject matter expertise across payment execution, processing and settlement capabilities.

Processes
•    Lead engineering, development, platform operations and service management processes across the Payments Platform estate.
•    Establish engineering excellence standards covering software development lifecycle, DevSecOps, Site Reliability Engineering, testing, release management and platform operations.
•    Ensure payment platforms are engineered for high throughput, low latency, idempotency and resilience across critical domestic and international payment corridors.
•    Implement automated deployment, testing, monitoring, recovery and support processes to improve operational efficiency and reduce risk.
•    Drive continuous improvement of payment execution, reconciliation, settlement and exception management processes.
•    Lead management of platform dependencies, technology lifecycle activities and vendor-supported services.
•    Support the Bank's product operating model through effective alignment of Build and Run teams across the platform lifecycle.

People & Talent
•    Build and lead a high-performing global engineering, platform and site reliability organisation supporting the Payments Platform estate.
•    Create a culture of engineering excellence, accountability, innovation, ownership and continuous improvement.
•    Develop organisational capability across distributed systems engineering, cloud technologies, payments processing, resilience engineering and platform operations.
•    Attract, retain and develop world-class engineering talent through effective succession planning, career development and capability-building initiatives.
•    Coach and mentor engineering leaders and senior technical contributors.
•    Establish clear performance expectations, engineering standards and measurable delivery outcomes.
•    Promote agile ways of working, inclusion, collaboration and continuous learning across global teams.

Risk Management
•    Own technology and operational risk management for the Payments Platform estate.
•    Ensure payment platforms comply with regulatory resilience and operational risk requirements, including DORA, CPS 230 and applicable payment scheme obligations.
•    Maintain strong controls around platform availability, recoverability, cyber resilience, secure development and technology lifecycle management.
•    Lead identification, remediation and escalation of platform risks, vulnerabilities and control weaknesses.
•    Ensure recovery strategies, disaster recovery capabilities and business continuity arrangements meet agreed recovery objectives.
•    Drive proactive incident prevention through observability, telemetry, capacity management and resilience engineering practices.
•    Partner with Risk, Compliance, Cyber Security and Audit stakeholders to maintain an effective control environment across the platform estate.

Governance
•    Operate governance frameworks that ensure the Payments Platform estate meets enterprise architecture, engineering, security and operational standards.
•    Provide regular reporting on platform health, resilience, transformation progress, risks, technical debt and investment outcomes to the CIO Payments and governance forums.
•    Ensure platform decisions comply with approved architecture standards, engineering controls, technology policies and regulatory requirements.
•    Lead platform review forums covering resilience, service performance, operational risk, capacity management and modernization initiatives.
•    Maintain effective oversight of third-party technology partners and platform service providers.
•    Support internal and external audits, regulatory reviews and remediation activities.
•    Promote the Group's values, Code of Conduct and risk culture across the Payments Platform organisation.

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
•    Business Leaders (TB Cash and Payments)
•    Country CIOs / CTOs, T&O Leadership
•    Payments Product Management
•    Engineering, Infrastructure & Platform Teams
•    Enterprise Architecture
•    Cyber Security / ICS
•    Programme & Change Delivery Teams
•    Operations & Service Resilience Teams

Other Responsibilities
•    Embed Here for good and Group’s brand and values in Payments Platform. Perform other responsibilities assigned under Group, Country, Business or Functional policies and procedures.

Skills and Experience

•    Operational Risk Control
•    Software Engineering
•    Distributed Systems
•    Transaction Banking Processes
•    Payment Gateways
•    Clearing Engine
•    Message Transformation

Our Ideal Candidate

•    Deep expertise in software engineering, distributed systems, and low-latency transaction processing in transaction banking.
•    Mastery of high-throughput payment gateways, clearing engine design, message transformation, and ledger integration.
•    Proven track record of maintaining high-availability SLAs, payment resilience, and regulatory operational risk controls within strict operational schedules.
•    Experience leading engineering organizations of ~80+ headcount in a global bank or high-scale fintech.

About Standard Chartered

We're a global bank connecting clients to our differentiated network, offering growth opportunities in the world's most dynamic markets. Our strategy, which combines cross-border capabilities and leading wealth management expertise, helps us deliver our purpose - to drive commerce and prosperity through our unique diversity.

Over our 170-year history, and across a unique geographical footprint connecting Asia, Africa and the Middle East to each other and the world, we've built a bank like no other, with diverse capabilities and partnerships that set us apart.

What We Offer

• Being part of an inclusive and values driven organisation, one that embraces and celebrates our unique diversity, across our teams, business functions, and geographies.
• 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 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.

Visit our careers website to learn more about us: www.sc.com/careers.

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