Senior Associate Director, Software Engineering

Some careers have more impact than others.

If you’re looking for a career where you can make a real impression, join HSBC and discover how valued you’ll be.

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

Business:CTO Platforms (AI Platform)

Job ID：58138

Location: Guangzhou

Why join us?

HSBC Productivity Suite is our AI-powered workspace used by 250,000 colleagues across the bank. We’re moving beyond conversational generative AI to build intelligent agents and integrations that connect colleagues with trusted enterprise knowledge, services and workflows.

You’ll join a global engineering team solving complex problems at significant scale. You’ll have the opportunity to shape how artificial intelligence is designed, governed and used across HSBC, with real influence over architecture, engineering standards and product direction.

This is a hands-on technical leadership role for someone who wants to progress through engineering depth, delivery and influence.

The Opportunity:

Our team consists of around 50 engineers across the UK, India, Poland and China. We’re continuing to grow our engineering capability in China and are looking for a senior engineer to provide technical leadership across one or more engineering pods.

As a Senior Associate Director, you’ll 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.

You’ll spend more than half your time designing, writing, testing and shipping production software. You’ll own significant AI capabilities and integrations, help define our technical vision and roadmap, and raise engineering standards across our global team.

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.

/51/LP/WX

About HSBC Technology China

We develop, implement and support software and IT services and processes that allow HSBC to remain at the forefront of high-quality banking systems.

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.

Candidate with less relevant experience or skills may be offered a lower Global Career Band than stated above.

Due to the urgent hiring need, candidates with immediate right to work locally and no relocation need will be prioritised.

*Issued By HSBC Software Development (GuangDong) Limited*