Principal Engineer

Brand:  HSBC
Area of Interest:  Technology
Location: 

Guangzhou, GD, CN, 510620

Work style:  Hybrid Worker
Date:  7 May 2026

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 Principal Engineer.

 

Business: Enterprise Technology L3

 

Job ID42011

 

Principal responsibilities

  • Act as the senior technology leader for the Foundations Data portfolio, accountable to the Head of Foundations Data and Head of Foundations Technology China for relevant technology decisions and outcomes. 
  • Own the technical direction and provide technology governance across Foundations data portfolio, define target architecture, standards and reference implementations. 
  • Drive stakeholder alignment and transparent delivery governance (prioritisation, dependencies, RAID, and executive updates) across Finance, Risk, CTO, CDAO and COO. 
  • Own technology risk and control posture for the estate, ensuring operational and security risks are identified, assessed, and managed in line with Group and business objectives. 
  • Ensure alignment to GCIO priorities and the Group Data strategy (Data Fabric), including adoption plans and measurable progress  
  • Set engineering quality bars: coding standards, testing strategy, release governance, and operational readiness 
  • Ensure solutions meet non-functional requirements: security, resilience, performance, etc. 
  • Embed a “production-first” operating model through automation, reduced manual/interactive production access, and strong run/operate disciplines (e.g., access controls, auditability, and resilience practices). 
  • Drive measurable improvement in stability, incident reduction, and MTTR 
  • Mentor senior engineers, coach teams on modern practices, and raise capability across the organisation. 
  • Build communities of practice, influence through expertise rather than hierarchy. 
  • Champion Agile practices and AI innovation.

 

 

Knowledge & Experience/Qualifications

  • A strong engineering background and the ability to operate strategically whilst also drilling down into the detail with the engineering teams.
  • Hands-on passionate technologist – the role expects to be hands-on (c.60%) including critical-path engineering, prototyping, and code reviews.
  • Proven track record designing and delivering enterprise-scale data platform or data transition applications.
  • Deep experience on Cloud-native platform engineering.
  • Expert-level CI/CD for data and software, plus Infrastructure as Code and environment promotion controls.
  • Strong observability: logging/metrics/tracing, data pipeline monitoring, SLOs/SLAs, incident management
  • Strong understanding of security-by-design: encryption, key management, secrets handling, access control, data masking/tokenisation where needed.
  • Ability to optimise query performance, storage formats, partitioning, indexing, and cost/performance trade-offs at scale.
  • Experience with streaming and near-real-time patterns where Risk/Finance use cases require timeliness.
  • Practical experience with distributed processing frameworks and workflow orchestration
  • Evidence of engineering community contribution (internal or external) is a plus
  • A good understanding of Financial Services with knowledge of the Finance and Financial Risk domains
  • Experience of designing and running highly available systems at scale (50+ microservices) (ex. Trading Systems, Banking apps & services)
  • Ability to follow the industry shifts and offerings across the full-stack including Containers, Kubernetes, Cloud, microservices, data lakes, storage and networking in Cloud environments. 
  • Ability to provide technical and conceptual thought leadership, successfully navigate areas of ambiguity and stakeholder disagreement to achieve required outcomes.
  • Excellent written and spoken communication skills across all communities, with experience of successfully influencing senior stakeholders, negotiating effectively, and winning over audiences with compelling and persuasive presentations

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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 (GuangDong) Limited***