Development Lead

Job Summary Digital Ledger Technology (DLT) & Digital Assets (DA) are the strategic client access platforms for CIB clients to transact with the Bank. We are seeking an experienced and technically strong Development Manager to lead software initiatives within our Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) Centre of Excellence. This role involves end-to-end ownership of innovative, high-impact projects involving blockchain infrastructure, digital assets, and enterprise-grade integrations. The ideal candidate will bring a balance of deep technical expertise, strategic thinking, and strong people management skills to drive product delivery across emerging technologies and regulated environments. As a Delivery Lead the candidate is expected to lead the full tribe of development squads working on the multiple aspects of this domain and future strategic areas (on smart contracts and tokenization). The role demands that the person works as a trusted business partner to manage multiple programs & projects within this domain. Associates will need to create and nurture relations with business partners, technology heads, operations, group & country products, risk governance and planning support & services. A strong technology acumen is required to create innovative solutions for the Bank’s digital banking space. A key responsibility will be to evolve the engineering organization toward an AI-native development model, where AI coding assistants and specialized engineering agents augment engineers across analysis, design, development, testing, security, documentation, deployment and production support, while maintaining appropriate human oversight, security, auditability and regulatory controls Key Responsibilities Strategy • Advocate and communicate the global digital vision and strategy to all stakeholders across the business and work. • Maintain an understanding of external competitive platform developments, smart contracts and their impact on our business and innovation strategy. • Build and foster an engineering excellence culture through leadership and direction. Build an engineering and system thinking mindset with values such as fast feedback, repeatability, simplicity, and clean code. • Drive a modern approach to engineering excellence, ensuring fast, frequent and high-quality value delivery. With thought Leadership, evangelism, and upskilling the workforce on cloud, architecture, engineering and Open Banking and API • Establish an engineering model where AI augments — rather than replaces accountability for — architecture, coding, testing, security and production decisions. • Identify opportunities for agentic workflows spanning requirements → design → code → test → security validation → deployment → observability. • Build reusable digital assets and payment capabilities rather than point solutions. • Maintain awareness of emerging blockchain, tokenization, payments, AI and software-engineering technologies and assess their applicability to the Bank. • Drive adoption of AI-assisted software development across engineering teams. • Establish controlled use of enterprise-approved coding assistants and AI engineering tools. • Develop agentic software-development workflows capable of assisting engineers • Develop reusable AI agents for engineering activities where appropriate. • Establish integration of AI agents with engineering toolchains including source control, IDEs, CI/CD, test automation, security scanning and observability platforms. • Define human-in-the-loop controls so that engineers remain accountable for generated code and production changes. • Establish controls covering source-code confidentiality, intellectual property, data leakage, model access, prompt security, auditability and traceability. • Ensure AI-generated code follows the same — or stronger — security, quality, testing and approval requirements as human-developed code. • Establish engineering metrics measuring AI impact on developer productivity, code quality, defect rates, test coverage, security findings and delivery lead time. • Encourage teams to move from simple AI coding assistance toward controlled multi-agent engineering workflows, where appropriate. Business • Provide technical leadership and guidance in Digital Ledger Technologies (DLT) related solutioning. • Build & maintain blockchain protocols, smart contracts, tokenization modules and consensus algorithms. • Ensure security, integrity, and scalability of blockchain solutions. • Stay updated with emerging trends and technologies in blockchain and cryptocurrency. • Troubleshoot and resolve issues in blockchain applications and systems. • Suggest blockchain development processes and best practices. • Perform code reviews to ensure code quality, maintainability, security, scalability, and adherence to coding standards. • Trusted advisor to the business. Work hand in hand with Business platforms CPOs and COO partners, taking product programs from investment decisions into design, specifications, solutioning, development, implementation and hand-over to operations, securing support and collaboration from other SCB teams. • Manage business partner expectations. Ensure delivery to business meeting time, cost and with high quality • Providing thought leadership on solutions and collaborating across team and functional lines • Drive an ecosystem of innovation and enabling business through technology • Blockchain Platforms: Hands-on experience with permissioned blockchain frameworks such as Quorum, Hyperledger Besu, Hyperledger Fabric, and Corda, including provisioning, configuration, and orchestration. • DLT Use Cases: Demonstrated understanding of DLT applications such as Real World Asset (RWA) tokenization, Cross-Border Payments, Decentralized Identity (DID), and smart contract-based financial products. • Software Engineering: Strong proficiency in backend development using Python or Golang, Solidity, RESTful API design, and microservice architectures. • DevOps & Depl…