Job Summary

The Head of NextGen AI will lead the design, delivery, and scale-up of a high-impact function focused on operationalizing generative and agentic AI across the enterprise. This role combines hands-on leadership with product-minded strategy, focused on embedding AI into real-world workflows—particularly in regulated industries such as legal, finance, and compliance.
 

Key Responsibilities

Strategy

• Delivering, building and maintaining the Data Driven solutions that are core to Group Operations strategy.

Business

• Provide thought leadership in data science techniques and business applications to unlock the value of SCB’s data sets and external information.
• Continually look at the environment to challenge our assumptions around new sources of data, potential analytics partners, tools, talent and infrastructure.
• Engage with internal clients to improve delivery of analytic projects.
• Explore leading methodologies and best practices and importing successful methodologies from international markets.
   

People and Talent 

Recruiting, develop and retain a world class team of diverse data scientists and data architects
 

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.
• Lead the team to achieve the outcomes set out in the Bank’s Conduct Principles: Fair Outcomes for Clients; Effective Financial Markets; Financial Crime Compliance; The Right Environment.
• Effectively and collaboratively identify, escalate, mitigate and resolve risk, conduct and compliance matters.

Key Stakeholders

Business Analysts, Business Partners, Chief Operating Officer, Business, ITO, CDO, internal staff, clients and 3rd parties.

Skills and Experience

Set the Vision

• Develop and communicate a practical and forward-looking AI roadmap aligned with business operations, regulatory expectations, and long-term technology capabilities.

Build and Lead

• Establish a compact, multidisciplinary team of AI engineers, prompt specialists, and ML ops talent. Create a strong team culture grounded in technical rigor and user-oriented delivery.

From Idea to Impact

• Run structured workshops and exploratory sprints with legal, compliance, and business teams to identify pain points and uncover high-leverage automation and augmentation opportunities.

Prototype to Production

• Deliver scalable AI solutions—from low-lift internal copilots to robust LLM+RAG+agent architectures integrated within enterprise workflows. Emphasis on velocity, iteration, and long-term maintainability.

Enterprise Integration

• Ensure seamless and secure integration of AI workflows with business-critical platforms (e.g., contract management systems, ERP platforms like SAP, and compliance tools), respecting constraints of legacy architecture where needed.

Measure & Iterate

• Define impact using concrete business metrics (e.g., time saved, risk exposure reduced, adoption rate), while embedding rapid feedback loops into the development lifecycle.

Governance & Safety

• Implement frameworks for AI auditability, traceability, and compliance—particularly relevant in regulated sectors. Champion responsible AI standards without stalling innovation.

Translate Across Layers

• Communicate clearly across all levels—from technical architecture to executive updates—ensuring alignment between engineering teams and business stakeholders.

Preferred:

• Has led AI product development from early ideation through enterprise-scale deployment—often in settings where formal structure was still emerging.
• Combines technical acumen (prompt design, system architecture, data pipelines) with product instincts (user adoption, intuitive flows, business value).
• Operates with a pragmatic, shipping-oriented mindset—comfortable iterating quickly and improving over time.
• Brings cross-cultural fluency and strong communication skills—able to adapt language and style for global teams and stakeholders.
• Understands the challenges of enterprise AI scale-up—including internal enablement, upskilling, and long-term change management.
• Builds systems people want to use—not just because they’re powerful, but because they’re usable.

Qualifications

Qualification:

• 15+ years of experience across product, engineering, and innovation roles, including recent hands-on delivery of generative AI use cases in enterprise settings.
• Proven ability to ship working AI solutions in complex environments—examples may include contract review copilots, compliance-aware checklists, or embedded document analysis systems.
• Fluency in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), orchestration frameworks, prompt layering, and secure API-based system design.
• Experience working within regulated industries (e.g., banking, legal, insurance), with practical knowledge of data governance, risk mitigation, and integration with compliance teams.
• Strong track record of moving from blank slate to production—able to identify business value, build prototypes quickly, and iterate based on usage and feedback.
• Comfortable operating across disciplines, including product, engineering, legal, and design.
• Effective in navigating global, multilingual organizations and distributed teams.

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.