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If you’re looking for further opportunities to develop your career, take the next step in fulfilling your potential right here at HSBC.
HSBC is one of the largest banking and financial services organisations in the world, with operations in 58 countries and territories. We aim to be where the growth is, enabling businesses to thrive and economies to prosper, and, ultimately, helping people to fulfil their hopes and realise their ambitions.
We are currently seeking an experienced professional to join our team in the role of Principal Engineer - AI
Department Background: Retail Tech UK
The Opportunity:
This role operates as a key technical member of the senior leadership team, supporting the AI and Pune site strategy for UK Technology, across all business lines. Shaping engineering standards, innovation outcomes aligned to business growth, regulatory expectations, and customer experience.
The Principal Engineer - UK Tech AI is a senior, technical technology leader - accountable for the strategic direction, delivery, and engineering excellence of core UK Technology platforms, whilst leading enterprise-wide advancement of Artificial Intelligence capabilities for UK Technology. In addition, the role will provide leadership and oversight of the large-scale India/ Pune strategic technology site ~ 1K colleagues.
What you’ll do:
Engineering Excellence:
- Hold principal engineering accountability for UK Technology, including architecture, platforms, software engineering practices, and technical quality.
- Identify and implement synergies and simplification across technology stacks. This involves driving platform and architectural convergence, efficiency improvements, and fostering a high-performance engineering culture.
- Provide technical leadership across the end-to-end delivery and run lifecycle, utilising their skills and expertise to carry out software development, testing and operational support activities typically being deployed to resolve the most challenging and/or impactful projects or deliveries
- Establish a digital environment and automate processes to minimize variation and ensure predictable high-quality code and data.
- Provide support to DevOps teams working at all stages of a product or service release/change with a strong customer focus and end to end journeys, ensuring they have an excellent domain knowledge.
- Working with Ops, Dev and Test Engineers to ensure operational issues (performance, operator intervention, alerting, design defect related issues, etc.) are identified and addressed at all stages of a product or service release / change.
- Enhance Developer / Tester experience through seamless adoption of Continuous Testing capability for effective CI/CD
- Define and own engineering strategy and standards, ensuring scalability, resilience, security, and regulatory compliance across customer-facing and core systems.
- Partner with business, product, and operations leaders to translate customer and regulatory needs into robust technology solutions.
- Provide senior technical leadership on modernisation initiatives, including cloud adoption, platform simplification, legacy transformation, and API-led integration.
- Act as a senior escalation point for complex technology problems
- Develop accelerated delivery pipeline by embracing automated tools in DevOps environment and collaborating closely with Product Owners
- Adopt new technologies, like Gen AI, to drive the Engineering or Platform evolution.
Site Head [Pune]:
- Act as Site Head for the Pune-India UK technology team, with leadership accountability for of c.1000 colleagues across engineering, delivery, and support functions across all business lines
- Champion engagement, inclusion, and performance, fostering a high-performing, collaborative, and values-driven environment.
- Work closely with the Leadership team to set the strategic vision, operating model, and culture for the India site, ensuring strong alignment with UK business and technology priorities.
- Provide executive leadership on talent strategy, including hiring, capability development, succession planning, and retention of senior technology leaders.
Artificial Intelligence:
- Drive the adoption and culture of artificial intelligence and machine learning solutions across UK technology.
- Identifying opportunities to automate workflows, enhance data-driven decision-making, and improve customer experiences. The role will ensure AI initiatives are aligned with business objectives, comply with regulatory requirements, and are implemented securely and ethically.
- Serve as the executive sponsor and accountable leader for Artificial Intelligence across UK Technology.
- Define and deliver the AI strategy, covering use cases such as customer experience, fraud, financial crime, operations, engineering productivity, and decision intelligence.
- Ensure AI solutions are ethical, explainable, secure, and compliant with UK regulatory expectations and internal risk frameworks.
- Build and nurture strong AI engineering and data science capabilities, including talent, platforms, tooling, and partnerships.
- Promote responsible innovation, embedding AI into products and processes in a way that delivers measurable business value.
Stakeholders/Customers
- Contribute to stakeholder / customer on program planning and roadmap strategy
- Have a strong understanding of the business domain and engage with the business on roadmap planning and lead its execution
- Manage effectively in a matrix organization across diverse stakeholders and geographies
- To deliver a set of globally integrated technology services supporting a diverse set of business and functional needs
- ‘Joining up’ HSBC UK engineering community
- To deal with a range of complex issues with conflicting and changing priorities
- To manage the balance between effective execution of day-to-day operations and services, whilst driving a substantial transformation agenda
- To challenge the status quo with peers across Technology leadership teams, as well as counterparts across VS
- To capture, leverage and promote best practice methodologies and tools across HSBC UK
Leadership & Governance
- Operate as a senior technology executive, influencing at ExCo / Board-level forums as required.
- Establish strong UK–India leadership connectivity, ensuring clarity of accountability, decision-making, and outcomes.
- Drive a culture of engineering excellence, innovation, and accountability, balancing pace with safety and resilience.
- Represent technology in key regulatory, audit, and external stakeholder engagements.
- Clearly understands the Group Strategy and translates it into immediate business/function
- Defines a clear strategy for the unit and drives its implementation with short and long term plan of action
Operational Risk and Control
- Maintains oversight of compliance across all programs
- Ensure adherence to Group compliance policy
- Actively manages and mitigates the risks associated with the work role
- Ensures MSIIs are actively identified and managed
- Identifies and manages staff and skill related risks
What you will need to succeed in the role:
- The candidate must have a strong technology depth and breadth, and extensive experience in DevOps or software engineering roles.
- Solid understanding of DevOps principles, CI/CD pipelines, and configuration management tools (e.g., Git, Jenkins, Ansible)
- Deep knowledge of software development and experience in a range of coding languages such as Python, C++, JavaScript, HTML.
- Experience with cloud-based AI platforms, especially Microsoft Azure.
- Agile and Lean management practices
- Senior leadership experience in large-scale financial services or regulated technology environments.
- Demonstrable experience leading AI or advanced analytics initiatives at enterprise scale.
- Strong understanding of UK banking regulation, operational resilience, and risk management.
- An entrepreneurial drive, with the ability to deconstruct and solve problems, to investigate drivers and “root causes” and drive business action planning to deliver solutions.
- Effective communication, influencing and negotiation and strong stakeholder management skills at all levels and across diverse, global teams and key stakeholders across
- Deep and wide subject matter expertise of exceptional ability to lead diverse teams across global functions, with strong people leadership, teamwork, gathering information and analyzing, judgment and decision making, communication competencies.
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. We encourage applications from all suitably qualified persons irrespective of, but not limited to, their gender or genetic information, sexual orientation, ethnicity, religion, social status, medical care leave requirements, political affiliation, people with disabilities, color, national origin, veteran status, etc., We consider all applications based on merit and suitability to the role.
Personal data held by the Bank relating to employment applications will be used in accordance with our Privacy Statement, which is available on our website.
***Issued By HSBC Software Development (India) Limited***
