Sr. Associate Director, Software Engineering

We are currently seeking an experienced professional to join our team in the role of Sr. Associate Director, Software Engineering. You will join a global engineering team solving complex problems at significant scale, working on HSBC Productivity Suite, an AI-powered workspace used by 250,000 colleagues across the bank.

As a Senior Associate Director, you will operate as a senior individual contributor on complex, high-impact engineering problems central to HSBC Productivity Suite. This is not a people-management role. It's for an engineer who is strongest in hands-on system design and coding and wants to progress towards Principal Engineer through technical leadership rather than formal line management.

Principal responsibilities:

• Spend more than half your time on hands-on engineering, writing, reviewing, testing and shipping production code for HSBC Productivity Suite.
• Design and build production-grade generative AI capabilities and integrations, taking ownership from initial design through deployment, operation and continuous improvement.
• Provide technical leadership across engineering pods, forming a clear technical vision, setting direction and breaking complex programmes of work into manageable deliveries.
• Make sound technical decisions across performance, security, cost, maintainability, technical debt, failure handling, observability, rollout safety and long-term operability.
• Shape technical strategy and roadmaps, influencing priorities and translating user needs and ambiguous business problems into measurable outcomes and practical engineering plans.
• Drive reusable capabilities, frameworks, engineering standards and effective technology controls, including monitoring and the safe use of AI coding tools and agents across the software development lifecycle.
• Raise engineering capability through pairing, design and code reviews, practical mentoring, knowledge-sharing and example-setting, without formal line-management responsibility.
• Lead continuous improvement in production stability, setting measurable goals to reduce incidents and recovery times and leading from the front during production issues.

Knowledge & Experience / Qualifications:

• Deep, hands-on software engineering experience, with a strong record of designing, coding and operating user-facing products and distributed services at scale.
• Advanced use of AI coding tools, such as GitHub Copilot, to prototype, write, test and review code safely, alongside experience building agents that improve the software development lifecycle.
• Strong Python expertise and practical knowledge of modern engineering practices, including application programming interfaces, microservices, databases, containers, automated testing and continuous integration and delivery.
• Hands-on experience taking artificial intelligence, machine learning and generative AI solutions from experimentation through to secure, reliable production use.
• Strong practical knowledge of large language models, prompt engineering, retrieval-augmented generation, agentic workflows, evaluation, guardrails, observability and responsible AI.
• Strong engineering judgement, with the ability to balance performance, security, cost, resilience, maintainability, technical debt and delivery pace when making complex design decisions.
• Experience forming a technical vision, influencing business and engineering priorities, breaking complex work into manageable deliveries and raising standards through technical expertise rather than formal authority.
• Strong ownership, problem-solving and communication skills, with the ability to work autonomously across global and multicultural teams, explain technical trade-offs clearly and turn ambiguous problems into robust, measurable outcomes.