Head of North Star Engineering, China

Job description

Job description

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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 Head of North Star Engineering, China

Business: Wealth & Personal Banking IT

Principal responsibilities 
The success of Wealth and Personal Banking has allowed us to build on our position as one of the world’s largest and fastest growing wealth franchises. Significant effort has already been made towards the WPB strategy to deliver exceptional products, service, and experiences to our customers.

Reporting into the Head of Technology North Star, the Head of North Star Engineering, China will have the responsibility for Engineering practices and Leadership of the key North Star programme which will build the Best Mobile Banking for HSBC.  These responsibilities of the role will include resources management, costs, operational stability, and overall resilience primarily focused on Strategic guidance of the operational stability of the North Star Engineering team in China.  The position will work in partnership with Value Stream/Platform Leads to drive the best outcomes of our North Star Engineering to include Engineering best practices, ensuring the alignment with WPB Technology strategy & Platform Hub Standard and uptime of the services for our customers. 

Key activities of this position developing an Engineering and Technology strategy and roadmap for the North Star Engineering by considering key technology wide priorities. Maintaining and developing best in class service resiliency and management, adopting AI technology solution and driving the Platform evolution together with Digital Platform. The role holder will be accountable for leading the building, maintaining and 24x7 support of large-scale North Star development and support services that enable customer to enjoy the good and personal mobile services.

Impact on the Business 
• Provide leadership and accountability across more than 20 North Star Engineering PoDs in China.
• Establish and develop strong technical leadership and relationships with architecture, Value Stream/Platform leads.
• Ownership and accountability for the operational stability and resiliency of the North Star engineering strategy and practices.
• Represent North Star Engineering across the broader WPB and Technology community in relation to Engineering controls, resiliency, and operational stability.
• Define, develop and practically implement state-of-the-art strategies to solving complex and ambiguous problems using modern set of technology platforms across multiple countries. 
 Build a great engineering team that delivers excellent results to difficult problems across multiple functions.
• Adopt AI those technology to drive the Engineering or Platform evolution.

Stakeholders – Internal and External 
• Improve technology stability and resiliency i.e., leading adoption and new ways of working whilst managing the risk of service outages.
• Manage an effective relationship with partners and third-party vendor to ensure successful uptime and efficient cost management.
• Creates and manages strong and trusted working relationship inside and outside of WPB through strong relationships within the broader HSBC group.
• North Star Egnineering representation in relevant technology and business executive forums.
• Lead the roll out of new ways of operating and the skills development across the Engineering capability within North Star.

Leadership & Teamwork 
• Optimise resources China to create an integrated team leveraging the North Star teams in other regions.
• Manage China teams and participate into global teams including all aspects of data processing design, development, acquisition, testing, conversion and production support.
• Within the global engineering, promote technology sharing and leverage operating environments to achieve greater cost efficiency.
• Provide senior management with overall comfort level and technological positioning of the company relative to the mission and industry.
• Joint the global leadership team to build an effective global team through communication, performance management, development plans and reward/recognition practices.
• Cultivate an environment that supports diversity and reflects the HSBC brand.
• Able to manage engineering under the tight budget and time frames.

Operational Effectiveness & Control
• Ensure technology goals are identified, communicated, documented, agreed and delivered in the most cost-effective manner possible.
• Identifying key risks, issues and interdependencies and provide appropriate mitigation strategies. 
• Supporting audit / independent programme assessments as required
• Ensure HSBC is not put at any operational or reputational risk.

Major Challenges 

• To 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’ WPB IT teams across WPB’s language, cultural, systems and legislative boundaries. 
• 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, whilst driving a transformation agenda.
• To achieve the above whilst effectively ensuring that risk is well managed. 
• To respond to constantly increasing regulatory demands within existing capability and capacity constraints.
• To stay abreast of external developments in local/global regulation, market trends and competitor activity.
• To challenge the status quo with peers across Technology leadership teams, as well as counterparts in GBGFs
• To capture, leverage and promote best practice methodologies and tools across WPB, based on lessons learned across 
• WPB teams globally and on standards established by Global IT horizontals (e.g., Design and Application Development & Maintenance, IT Security, IT Risk, IT COO).

Role Context 
• Coordinate with Value Stream and Platform Leads to provide insight on pre-existing solutions.
• Promote re-use of readily built solutions and global components.
• Manage end-to-end Engineering delivery of underlying technology capabilities for North Star Programme.
• Responsible for about 200 FTE within WPB Technology.
• Primary reporting relationship is to the Head of Technology North Star.
• Works closely and collaboratively with WPB Technology CIOs, COO & other VS/Platform CTOs.
• Focus on building the staff capabilities and improving the cost efficiency in China.
• Occasional travel to facilitate management of objectives.

Management of Risk 
The jobholder will ensure the fair treatment of our customers is at the heart of everything we do, both personally and as an organisation. This will be achieved by consistently displaying the behaviours required to support the Best Place to Bank principles of Make Better Products, Sell Them Properly and Keep Them Sold.

The jobholder will also continually reassess the operational risks associated with the role and inherent in the business, taking account of changing economic or market conditions, legal and regulatory requirements, operating procedures and practices, management restructurings, and the impact of new technology. 

This will be achieved by ensuring all actions take account of the likelihood of operational risk occurring. 
Also, by addressing any areas of concern in conjunction with line management and/or the appropriate department.

Observation of Internal Controls
The jobholder will also adhere to and be able to demonstrate adherence to internal controls. This will be achieved by adherence to all relevant procedures, keeping appropriate records and, where appropriate, by the timely implementation of internal and external audit points, including issues raised by external regulators.

The jobholder will implement the Group compliance policy by containing compliance risk in liaison with Global Head of Compliance, Global Compliance Officer, Area Compliance Officer or Local Compliance Officer. The term ‘compliance’ embraces all relevant financial services laws, rules and codes with which the business has to comply. 

This will be achieved by adhering to all relevant processes/procedures and by liaising with the Compliance department about new business initiatives at the earliest opportunity. Also, and when applicable, by ensuring adequate resources are in place and training is provided, fostering a compliance culture and optimising relations with regulators.

Role Dimensions 
• Head of North Star Engineering, China across WPB Technology covering about 200 people. 
• Face-off and stakeholder management to WPB Technology

Requirements

• Proven track record of success in senior technology leadership roles within complex financial services companies and involvement in complex technology transformations.
• Deep technical expertise in software development (especially Mobile), architecture, and infrastructure, with hands-on experience in building scalable, high-performance systems.
• Experience in and working understanding of hosting platforms for online and mobile applications.
• Accountable experience for service performance of end-to-end services delivered (e.g., service SLA, MTTR, etc.)
• A combination of technical expertise, influencing, strategic thinking, and business acumen.
• Large scale and complex enterprise planning capabilities 
• Experience of agile at scale methods, using Scaled Agile and DevSecOps tools and processes
• Demonstrable success in understanding and delivering towards customer needs in large, complex organizations.
• Ability to lead and influence across a broad range of the Technology organizations.
• Managing operational functions, directing process re-engineering and efficiency exercises.
• Strong ability to balance risks vs. rewards and maximizing the cost effectiveness and profitability for the business.
• Respectful of different cultures, working with colleagues from different regions.
• Ability to lead and influence global teams.
• Strong understanding of operational effectiveness and strong numbers driven.
• Leading and directing executive and non-executive work groups and effecting change through people.

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.” 

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