Sr. Associate Director, Software Engineering

Some careers shine brighter than others.

If you’re looking for a career that will help you stand out, join HSBC and fulfil your potential. Whether you want a career that could take you to the top, or simply take you in an exciting new direction, HSBC offers opportunities, support and rewards that will take you further.

HSBC is one of the largest banking and financial services organisations in the world, with operations in 64 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.

In this role, you will:

• Own solution design for complex Java services/platforms, covering domain boundaries, APIs, integration patterns and non-functional requirements (security, resilience, performance).
• Set and drive engineering standards across squads (OpenAPI-first design, API versioning/backward compatibility, idempotency, error models, secure-by-design).
• Lead event-driven engineering using Kafka, including topic strategy, schema evolution, retries/backoff, DLQ patterns and reliability trade-offs.
• Define and embed quality strategy at scale (test pyramid, integration testing, Testcontainers, contract testing such as Pact/Spring Cloud Contract) into CI.
• Strengthen CI/CD and DevSecOps controls (quality gates, dependency/security scanning, secrets detection, release governance, production readiness).
• Champion production excellence through observability (logs/metrics/traces), incident response and RCA, preventative engineering and operational runbooks.
• Guide PostgreSQL design and performance (schema/indexing, query optimisation, transactions/isolation levels, and migrations using Flyway/Liquibase).
• Enable responsible AI-assisted engineering and agentic delivery by defining guardrails and ensuring evaluation and monitoring are built-in.

To be successful in this role, you should meet the following skill requirements:

• •    12–15 years’ experience building and owning production-grade systems, with proven hands-on technical leadership as an individual contributor across teams.
• Strong Java backend engineering (Java 11/17+, Spring Boot, Spring MVC, Spring Data JPA/Hibernate, transaction management; understanding of Spring Security concepts).
• Strong REST API design skills (OpenAPI/Swagger, versioning, backward compatibility, idempotency, error modelling).
• Solid architecture/design capability (SOLID, GoF patterns, refactoring, clean/hexagonal architecture, pragmatic domain-driven design).
• Hands-on Kafka/event-driven expertise (producers/consumers, consumer groups, partitioning/ordering, schema evolution, retries/backoff, DLQ, idempotent consumers; familiarity with Avro/Protobuf + schema registry approaches).
• Strong testing and quality engineering (JUnit 5, Mockito, Spring Boot Test, Testcontainers; contract testing with Pact/Spring Cloud Contract; breaking-change management).
• CI/CD, runtime and operability skills (pipelines with quality gates, artefact/versioning discipline, Docker; collaboration with Kubernetes/OpenShift teams; structured logging, metrics and distributed tracing; incident response/RCA).
• Responsible AI engineering know-how (AI developer tooling usage with human review, governance/guardrails, evaluation and regression testing, monitoring/telemetry, and ensuring AI-assisted changes meet SDLC controls and security standards).

You’ll achieve more when you join HSBC
www.hsbc.com/careers 

HSBC is 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. 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 – HSDI