Job Summary

The Hive Lead is a senior strategic leadership role responsible for defining, evolving, and executing the Switching, Carss & Payment platform vision across multiple applications and squads. This individual ensures the platform acts as an accelerator for diverse product teams, balancing technical excellence with business outcomes. 

Collaborating with Domain Tech Leads, Engineering Leads, Architects, and leading a team of Product Owners, the Hive Lead guides a culture of agility, empowerment, and continuous innovation. This person champions long-term stability, user-focused design, and value-driven roadmaps—while embedding regulatory and risk considerations as natural aspects of the development process. The role also requires close adherence to the Enterprise Software Delivery Lifecycle (ESDLC), referencing relevant PO R&R documents and aligning with Clarity, Azure DevOps (ADO), and Confluence for planning and governance

About our Technology & Operations Team

Our Technology & Operations (T&O) team is the powerhouse for the Bank. We aim to go further, faster, to ensure we're agile and ready for tomorrow, today. Our diverse network enables us to innovate and build banking solutions that support communities to prosper. We're a place where talented people are encouraged to grow, learn, and thrive, to drive their own career journeys, to reach their full potential.
When you work with us, you’re protecting the reputation and legacy of a 170 year organisation and building on it. We’re driven by progress and continuously evolving to ensure we’re agile and ready for tomorrow, today

Role Responsibilities

• Demonstrable track record of delivering and scaling Switching, Cards & Payment Hub domain.
• Deep understanding and demonstrable track record of delivering the Cards & Payment platform using the open system Architecture and modern technology. 
• Knowledge of Card Issuance/Management, Digital Channels interface, Encryption, HSM and ISO8583 messaging standards
• Familiarity with Apple/Google Wallet Tokenization, QR Code Payments, Remittance, EMV Contact/Contactless, VISA and MasterCard Card Issuing & Acquiring, Scheme compliance requirements.
• Should have experience in multi-country Switching and Cards platform migration from legacy technology to the Open System Architecture platform. 
• Establish a multi-year strategic roadmap, blending market insights, business needs, and technical innovation to position the platform for future success.
• Evangelise this roadmap with domain and squad leaders, ensuring wide alignment and clear understanding of why, how and when the platform will evolve.
• Ensure platform initiatives directly support major WRB outcomes and domain-level OKRs.
• Champion a data-driven approach to prioritisation, incorporating both functional milestones and non-functional imperatives (e.g., security, scalability, performance).
• Drive adoption of measurable metrics (e.g., developer adoption, cost savings, time-to-market improvements) to improve the platform’s success.
• Proactively integrate technical debt reduction and compliance items into these priorities, balancing new feature delivery with foundational stability

• Work with Chapter Leads (Engineering, Architecture, QA, etc.) to align skill development with platform needs, ensuring squads are well-equipped to handle complexity.
• Advocate continuous learning, offering workshops or training on modern platform tech (e.g., APIs, cloud infrastructure, security frameworks).
• Continuously incorporate operational, security, and regulatory risk items into the backlog.
• Proactively escalate major risks (e.g. compliance blockers, infrastructure vulnerabilities) to domain leads, ensuring swift mitigation.
• Guarantee platform deliverables satisfy corporate policies (e.g., Group Plans, ESDLC gating) without imposing excessive bureaucracy on squads.
• Ensure platform-level artefacts, from architecture decisions to user stories, meet governance needs with minimal friction.
• Advocate for the platform in RF, QPR, or other governance bodies, linking platform metrics/deliverables to strategic business outcomes.
• Use data to highlight successes, risks, or resource requirements for upcoming platform increments.
  Oversee a structured release cadence, ensuring each major update meets performance, security, and quality benchmarks.

Our Ideal Candidate

Skills & Experience

• 17+ years of relevant experience in Banking domain
• Knowledge of Debit Card Issuance/Management, Digital Channels interface, Encryption, HSM and ISO8583 messaging standards
• Familiarity with EMV Contact/Contactless, VISA and MasterCard Card Issuing & Acquiring, Scheme compliance requirements
• Experience with an EFT transaction switching and processing.
• Familiarity on PCI DSS and PA DSS compliance requirements
• Experience on Switch integration with VISA/Mastercard is mandatory. Others such as UPI, JCB and National switches.
• Knowledge of end-to-end systems development life cycles (i.e., waterfall, Agile and other modern approaches to software development)
• Excellent in preparing the Solution Architecture document, Functional and technical spec
• Excellent problem-solving, team, and time management skills.
• Experience on Google Pay/Samsung Pay/Apple Pay Wallets and QR Code and Emerging payments will be a added Advantage
• Experience in Web Service integration and API’

Qualifications:

Education – relevant degree qualification preferred 

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

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