Senior Software Engineer (AI Guardrail)

We are seeking an experienced Senior Software Engineer to join our team in the role of AI Guardrail. As a key member of our technology department, you will be responsible for building and maintaining runtime/data plane services for synchronous and asynchronous guardrail execution.

Key responsibilities:

• Build and maintain runtime/data plane services for synchronous and asynchronous guardrail execution, including retries/timeouts/cancellation, backpressure, rate limiting, and overload protection.
• Develop control plane capabilities for policy/detector configuration, versioning, rollout/rollback, and tenant onboarding, exposed via internal platform APIs (REST and/or gRPC).
• Implement and integrate detectors: rule-based checks, LLM-based detection (e.g., LLM-as-judge), and third-party detection APIs, using consistent interfaces and configuration-driven orchestration.
• Deliver streaming/event-driven processing for guardrail workflows using WebSocket/SSE/gRPC streaming and/or messaging systems (e.g., Kafka/PubSub).
• Instrument end-to-end observability (metrics/logs/traces) and contribute to dashboards/alerts for latency, throughput, queue health, detector performance, and policy enforcement outcomes (e.g., OpenTelemetry/OpenInference).
• Troubleshoot and optimise production performance and reliability: profiling, bottleneck analysis, incident triage, root-cause analysis, and continuous hardening aligned to SLOs.

Requirements:

• 3+ years of professional experience building and operating distributed, cloud-native backend systems.
• Strong hands-on skills in Python (asyncio/FastAPI) and/or Go/Java, with a solid understanding of non-blocking I/O and concurrency.
• Proficient with containerization (Docker, Kubernetes) and CI/CD practices on at least one major cloud platform (GCP, AWS, Azure), with a strong mindset for reliability and security.
• Practical experience with modern architectural patterns, including control plane/data plane designs, streaming/event-driven systems (e.g., Kafka, gRPC), and hands-on experience with observability and distributed tracing (e.g., OpenTelemetry).
• Experience with detector engineering, including at least two of the following: LLM-based classification, third-party detection API integration, rule engines, or lightweight ML model integration.
• Solid experience with both relational (e.g., PostgreSQL) and NoSQL databases, plus experience with data modeling and query optimization in OLAP databases like BigQuery.
• Demonstrates strong end-to-end ownership and an 'AI-native' approach, leveraging AI tools (e.g., coding assistants) to drive execution, improve productivity, and enhance code quality.

You'll achieve more when you join HSBC. HSBC is an equal opportunity employer committed to building a culture where all employees are valued, respected and opinions count. We take pride in providing a workplace that fosters continuous professional development, flexible working and, opportunities to grow within an inclusive and diverse environment.