Associate Director, Software Engineering Specialist

We are currently seeking an experienced professional to join our team in the role of Associate Director, Software Engineering Specialist.

Principal responsibilities:

• Support the design and delivery of a prevention-first, intelligence-led Financial Crime technology architecture.
• Take an end-to-end view across Financial Crime journeys, including prevention, detection, decisioning, alerting, investigation, regulatory reporting, data, and feedback loops.
• Translate business needs into clear, practical technology solutions and phased delivery plans.
• Help modernise legacy applications into cloud-hosted, API-driven, event-enabled, and data-led platforms.
• Identify and shape appropriate AI/ML use cases, such as intelligent triage, real-time risk assessment, decision support, search, summarisation, workflow automation, and operational insights.
• Assess AI/ML opportunities based on business value, user need, data readiness, technical feasibility, control effectiveness, explainability, operational adoption, and governance.
• Encourage reusable capabilities, common integration patterns, and real-time data services that can be used across Financial Crime domains.
• Work with engineering, architecture, security, data, infrastructure, and operations teams to ensure solutions are secure, resilient, scalable, and supportable.
• Drive good engineering practices across architecture, delivery quality, CI/CD, testing, observability, automation, release controls, and production readiness.
• Provide technical challenge and support to delivery teams, helping resolve blockers and maintain momentum.
• Coach engineers and technical leads, raising capability in modern engineering, cloud, data, DevOps, and AI-assisted delivery.
• Build strong working relationships across global teams and help align stakeholders around delivery priorities and architecture decisions.

Requirements:

• Broad technical understanding across modern application architecture, APIs, microservices, event-driven integration, cloud platforms, data, DevOps, security, and automation.
• Ability to engage credibly with engineers and architects, review solution designs, identify risks, and challenge technical decisions constructively.
• Experience contributing to technology modernisation, cloud migration, application integration, or platform transformation initiatives.
• Working understanding of data platforms, data quality, real-time and batch integration, and how data supports decisioning and analytics.
• Familiarity with CI/CD, containerisation, Kubernetes, infrastructure automation, observability, and secure software delivery practices.
• Awareness of AI/ML solution patterns, including machine learning, LLM-based applications, RAG, agentic workflows, and AI-assisted engineering.
• Understanding of the principles behind MLOps or LLMOps, including controlled deployment, monitoring, governance, and operational support.
• Experience in Agile delivery environments, with exposure to tools such as Jira, Confluence, GitHub, Jenkins, Terraform, or equivalent.

Business and Financial Crime acumen:

• Ability to connect technology choices to business value, customer outcomes, operational efficiency, and control effectiveness.
• Good understanding of Financial Crime, fraud, risk, compliance, or regulated operational environments.
• Experience in banking is preferred.
• Ability to think across an end-to-end business journey rather than focus only on a single application or process step.
• Curiosity about how AI/ML, data, and automation can improve Financial Crime outcomes in a responsible and practical way.
• Ability to balance innovation with security, governance, resilience, delivery feasibility, and operational sustainability.

Leadership and collaboration:

• Demonstrated ability to drive change in a complex organisation, influence stakeholders, and turn strategic direction into practical delivery.
• Strong communication skills, able to explain complex technology and AI/ML concepts clearly to technical and non-technical audiences.
• Collaborative and pragmatic approach, with the confidence to challenge constructively and align teams around decisions.
• Strong ownership mindset: proactive, delivery-focused, and accountable for outcomes.
• Ability to work effectively across global, multicultural, and matrixed teams.
• Interest in mentoring others and helping build sustainable engineering and technology capability.