Head of Production Engineering -(Clearing Transaction Services)

The FI clearing & Liquidity, Collections and Hold business underpins all of the Group’s operations. In scope is the ownership of one or more pillars that come under FI Clearing & Liquidity, Collections and Hold Hive to support the FI clearing & Liquidity, Collections and Hold business of all USD, EUR, GBP and JPY currency transactions. This is a Group critical application suite requiring the delivery of constant service with reputational and regulatory implications to the Group should any failure in service arise, along with a constant level of change and functional uplift. We are looking for a dynamic and strategic leader to drive the UK Payments refresh program and also spearhead Production Engineering for the West. This role will work within a multi competency capability, encompassing vendor management, architecture, full stack engineering, business solution, and DevOps. The role will be responsible for supporting and delivering scalable, resilient, fault tolerant solutions from partner vendors. Formulate and deliver an end-to-end technology strategy in collaboration with the Cash product & COO team for all current and future technology requirements of the organisation. Consider multiple levers in the development and execution of the technology strategy including client experience, time to market, stability, resilience, scalability, cost efficiency, new ways of working etc. Acting as both Implementation Lead and Production Engineering Head for the West, this role is accountable to ensure successful execution of high value and low value payments modernisation in alignment with global TB strategy while addressing unique US regulatory, client and operational needs.

Key Responsibilities

• Part of SRE Production Engineering team to enhance application and infrastructure resiliency of service through self-healing and automated failovers - target a 99.9% up-time to customers.
• Oversee the planned/unplanned disruption of production infrastructure to ensure accountability for building resilient, always-on systems.
• Build resilience into the application so underlying system failures are handled gracefully and do not impact end users.
• Influence design/development teams to always be thinking of the rainy-day scenarios.
• Identify opportunities to eliminate all manual and repeatable activities (toil) via tooling and automation.
• Reduce the number of repeat incidents by permanently fixing the underlying root cause of issues.
• Develop automated predictive analysis of future capacity needs and drive the proactive upgrade of service capacity well in advance.
• Using Standard Charterer’s SDI (Software Defined Infrastructure) develop auto-scaling to deliver robust resilience to fluctuations in critical service demand.
• Continuously monitor service demand/capacity for any discrepancies or spikes.
• As Payments Implementation lead, oversee the coordination of E&A Payments Transformation program level milestones and adherence to Standard Chartered standards and governance mechanisms.
• Drive proactive management of issues and risks – working closely with interface and business partners and recognising the overall program level risks and identifying mitigation action plans.
• Establish engagement cadence with stakeholders to ensure that they are informed and part of the decision-making process (where required).
• Support prioritisation by assessing the business/client impact.
• Manage risks, issues, interdependencies, and coordination across programmes to ensure that information relating to programmes deliverables, risk and issues are effectively communicated between stakeholders and that key performance indicators are monitored and evaluated.

Strategy Availability/Reliability

• Take responsibility for meeting SLA/XLA expectations around the operability and reliability of our critical user service journeys, where our customers expect a 24x7 digital service offering.
• Examples of “always on” techniques to be used include caching, circuit breakers, dark and canary releases, store and service patterns and alternate user experience flows.
• Lead, own, manage, monitor, and optimize the reliability and health of all environments.
• Design, code, implement break fixes to improve service availability based on outcomes from thematic reviews.
• Drive conversation around development velocity using SLIs/SLOs data to ensure development velocity vs. service reliability is optimized in partnership with Product Teams.
• Iteratively review SLI/SLO/Error Budget policy to ensure the quantitative indicators of customer experience are accurate.
• Where an increased focus on reliability is required influence senior stakeholders to ensure resourcing/effort is made available.
• Anticipate market shifts and provide strategic recommendations to shape payments capabilities and client offerings.
• Work with Product Owner and Delivery team to manage and track the delivery of US projects.
• Leading overall strategy, planning, and execution of programs of work to support Cash Tech Transformation strategy, aligned to strategic wider bank transformation programme.
• Determine and ensure optimal cost of delivery of programs.
• Support Business and Transaction Banking Operations by leveraging technology to streamline processes, enhance productivity, enable straight-through processing & zero touch, reduce risk and improve controls.
• Work with the domain teams to ensure processes and controls are suitable to enable building and maintaining sustainable, well-controlled business solutions.
• Ensure transparency and appropriate escalation of material risks through relevant governance processes.
• Work actively with Product, Operations, and technology Teams to push client agenda and support respective businesses in risk reduction implementation activities.
• Continually evaluating services on Fit for purpose and run streamlined remediation programs with focused outcomes aligned to business and client priorities and risk reduction.

Processes Transition to Production

• Champion and evolve continuous delivery best practice standards to reduce release related incidents, manual hands-off and achieve our aspiration of “zero ops”.
• Partner with development teams to ensure applications are designed with scale, resilience, and performance in mind.

Monitoring

• Optimize monitoring to reduce false positive alerts.
• Creatively deepen monitoring capabilities leveraging the 3 tenets of observability – logs, metrics and traces.
• Ensure all critical user service journeys are traceable end to end.
• Ensure Production Solutions are fit for purpose. Where gaps are identified put a plan in place to uplift the toolset.
• Driving the delivery of complex software delivery projects in an agile environment.
• Perform risk and change management activities.
• Planning, resource allocation, financial management and project governance.
• Experienced in setting up and maintaining ADO and Confluence tools to facilitate effective Agile Project Management.
• Experienced in creating and maintaining Agile Metrics in ADO to monitor a team’s velocity and delivery progress.
• Experienced in proving clear and concise status updates.
• Experience of raising risks and issues and escalating to management at the earliest opportunity to ensure items are resolved in a timely manner.

People & Talent

• Lead through example and build the appropriate culture and values.
• Sets appropriate tone and expectations for their team and work in collaboration with risk and control partners.
• Employ, engage and retain high quality people such that Transaction Banking Technology is skilled and experienced to deliver its obligations.
• Ensure the provision of ongoing training and development, ensure that direct reports are suitably skilled and qualified for their roles and that they have effective supervision in place to mitigate any risks.
• Foster a culture of innovation, transparency and accountability in Transaction Banking technology while promoting a “business-first” mentality at all levels.
• Set and monitor job descriptions and objectives for direct reports and provide feedback and rewards in line with their performance against those responsibilities and objectives.
• Create a motivational and challenging environment for staff which is conducive to creativity and performance with customer centricity in mind.

Risk Management

• Responsible for addressing program delivery risks and other delivery risks like Operations risk, key person risk, change concentration risks, etc.
• Performing strategic assessment of the benefits and potential value generation of the IT services right from conception through investment, execution and BAU stage.
• Engage consistently with business, technology and operation teams for CIB-CASH TECHNOLOGY T&I throughout the whole lifecycle of Tech investments and stay aligned to the overall roadmap and strategy of the bank.
• Proactive in monitoring and seeking regular assurance that the areas of responsibility and teams are performing to an acceptable risk and control standard.
• Work towards the elimination of non-standard processes and systems that contribute to high operational risk.
• Act quickly and decisively when any risk and control weakness become apparent and ensure they are addressed within an appropriate timeframe and escalated through the relevant committees.
• Balance business performance, delivery and cost management constraints with risk and control matters to ensure that they do not materially threaten the Group’s ability to remain.

Governance

• Working with Business partners such as CPOs to prepare investment plan requests and manage approval of Programme(s) and define framework, mechanism to track, monitor the programs, frequent communication to CIO’s, COO’s & CPOs.
• Individual will lead and coordinate cross-functional, cross-departmental, cross-company teams that are responsible for all aspects of a Project or Programme, from Initiation to Closure.
• Partnering with relevant stakeholders, responsible for ensuring that the WoW are followed, and the relevant artefacts are delivered on time with quality, in adherence to the development methodology/approach.
• Knowledge and understanding of Governance processes, especially on the controls and policies.
• Defines, enhance, and drive a transparent service excellence & governance model with clear accountabilities.
• Manage communication of key risks/preventive actions and other key insights of services to stakeholders through appropriate forums including NFRC and other Sustainability forums (refinement meeting).
• Plan and participate in change governance forums as needed.
• Awareness and understanding of the regulatory requirements and expectations relevant to the role.

Regulatory & Business Conduct

• Display exemplary conduct and live by the Group’s Values and Code of Conduct.
• Take personal responsibility for embedding the highest standards of ethics, including regulatory and business conduct, across Standard Chartered Bank.
• This includes understanding and ensuring compliance with, in letter and spirit, all applicable laws, regulations, guidelines and the Group Code of Conduct.
• Lead to achieve the outcomes set out in the Bank’s Conduct Principles.
• Effectively and collaboratively identify, elevate, mitigate, and resolve risk, conduct and compliance matters.

Key stakeholders

• Internal: Country Heads, Product development team, Tech Hive Leads, Operations team, Business Heads in the country and the group, Cash Technology MT, Cash Technology COOs, CIB Cash Product Management Heads, CIB Trade Product Management Heads, Country CIO and CTM, CIB Tech MT, TB MT, Global Technology Services Heads (Production Support, Infrastructure, Testing etc), Interface team Heads.
• External: Regulators (as applicable), Relevant industry groups and professional bodies, Consultancy and recruitment agency relationships.

Other Responsibilities

• Here for good and Group’s brand and values in TB Cash team.
• Perform other responsibilities assigned under Group, Country, Business or Functional policies and procedures.

Our Ideal Candidate Skills & Experience

• 15 plus years of relevant working experience.
• Python commercial Scripting / shell (or equivalent).
• SWIFT Messaging.
• UNIX/Linux, AIX.
• Prognosis, Prometheus, ITRS, ELK or equivalent monitoring systems.
• Apache Kafka, IBM MQ, Solace (or equivalent).
• Java, Microservices.
• DevOps Tools (or equivalent).
• Automation experience with at least one configuration and deployment management systems such as Chef, Ansible or Puppet.
• Control-M (or equivalent).
• Infrastructure – Networking / Database (oracle) / web services.
• Relevant degree in Computer Science/Technology and evidence of continuous professional development in an IT role.
• Certified Scrum Master.

Qualification

• Relevant Degree qualification required.

What we offer

• In line with our Fair Pay Charter, we offer a competitive salary and benefits to support your mental, physical, financial and social wellbeing.
• Core bank funding for retirement savings, medical and life insurance, with flexible and voluntary benefits available in some locations.
• Time-off including annual leave, parental/maternity (20 weeks), sabbatical (12 months maximum) and volunteering leave (3 days), along with minimum global standards for annual and public holiday, which is combined to 30 days minimum.
• Flexible working options based around home and office locations, with flexible working patterns.
• Proactive wellbeing support through Unmind, a market-leading digital wellbeing platform, development courses for resilience and other human skills, global Employee Assistance Programme, sick leave, mental health first-aiders and all sorts of self-help toolkits.
• A continuous learning culture to support your growth, with opportunities to reskill and upskill and access to physical, virtual and digital learning.
• Being part of an inclusive and values driven organisation, one that embraces and celebrates our unique diversity, across our teams, business functions and geographies - everyone feels respected and can realise their full potential.