Development Lead

As a Development Lead at Standard Chartered Bank, you will lead software initiatives within the Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) Centre of Excellence. You own end-to-end delivery of innovative, high-impact projects involving blockchain infrastructure, digital assets, and enterprise-grade integrations across a full tribe of development squads. This role demands deep technical expertise, strategic thinking, and strong people management to drive product delivery in emerging technologies and regulated environments, while evolving the engineering organization toward an AI-native development model.

What you'll do

• Advocate and communicate the global digital vision and strategy to all stakeholders across the business.
• Maintain understanding of external competitive platform developments in smart contracts and assess their impact on business and innovation strategy.
• Build and foster an engineering excellence culture through leadership, establishing 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 through 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, and 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 and establish controlled use of enterprise-approved coding assistants and AI engineering tools.
• Develop agentic software-development workflows and 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.
• Provide technical leadership and guidance in Digital Ledger Technologies (DLT) related solutioning.
• Build and 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.
• Act as a trusted advisor to the business, working hand in hand with Business platforms CPOs and COO partners, taking product programs from investment decisions into design, specifications, solutioning, development, implementation, and handover to operations.
• Manage business partner expectations and ensure delivery to business meeting time, cost, and quality standards.
• Provide thought leadership on solutions and collaborate across team and functional lines.
• Drive an ecosystem of innovation and enable business through technology.
• Lead the design council for DCDA and represent DCDA in design reviews of other tech partners.
• Establish workstream governance and robust working relationships with internal and external stakeholders.
• Mobilize workstream teams in cooperation with Standard Chartered Bank key stakeholders and in collaboration with external stakeholders.
• Ensure adherence to the Technology System Delivery Framework of the Bank for all deliveries.
• Inculcate the Group's values and code of conduct in the DCDA delivery teams to ensure adherence to the highest standards of ethics and compliance.
• Coach and support junior engineers, fostering a culture of technical excellence and continuous learning.
• Build deep capability across blockchain, payments, cloud, and AI engineering.
• Develop engineers capable of combining domain knowledge with software engineering and AI-assisted development.
• Focus on developing talent by promoting a learning-based culture within the team.
• Lead through example and build appropriate culture and values, setting expectations for the team in collaboration with risk and control partners.
• Interpret and align all responsible applications under the Group's technology and security framework, identify key issues, and put in place appropriate controls and measures.
• Ensure awareness of the Global Payment Transparency Process and alignment to it.
• Effectively and collaboratively identify, escalate, mitigate, and resolve risk, conduct, and compliance matters.
• Promote and embed a culture of openness, trust, and risk awareness where ethical, legal, regulatory, and policy compliant conduct is the norm.
• Understand the regulatory framework around infrastructure hosting and data management for client-facing applications and regulatory requirements for the Bank, ensuring application design considerations are taken based on this.
• 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.

What you bring

• 10+ years of experience in Banking or Financial Services, with 5+ years of hands-on experience in blockchain initiatives.
• Hands-on experience with permissioned blockchain frameworks such as Quorum, Hyperledger Besu, Hyperledger Fabric, and Corda, including provisioning, configuration, and orchestration.
• Demonstrated understanding of DLT applications such as Real World Asset (RWA) tokenization, Cross-Border Payments, Decentralized Identity (DID), and smart contract-based financial products.
• Demonstrable experience introducing AI-assisted engineering or software-development automation into engineering teams.
• Strong proficiency in backend development using Python or Golang, Solidity, RESTful API design, and microservice architectures.
• Experience with containerization and orchestration using Docker, Kubernetes, and Helm, with a proven track record deploying systems on AWS EKS or Azure AKS using CI/CD pipelines.
• Knowledge of cryptographic primitives including public/private key infrastructure, symmetric/asymmetric encryption, digital signatures, and secure key management.
• Ability to collaborate across platform, security, network, and compliance teams to ensure seamless integration of DLT services into enterprise ecosystems.
• Experience working with solution architects and security domain experts to design and implement systems compliant with internal controls, regulatory requirements, and best practices.
• Familiarity with AWS and/or Azure networking, access controls, high-availability setups, and infrastructure automation.
• Proficiency in SDLC practices, Agile delivery, Git-based version control, issue tracking systems, and technical documentation.
• Strong understanding of blockchain technologies, distributed ledger, smart contracts, and tokenization flows.
• Knowledge of cryptography and blockchain protocols.
• Familiarity with P2P networks, zero knowledge proofs, staking, and consensus algorithms.
• Excellent problem-solving skills and ability to think analytically.
• Strong communication and collaboration skills.
• Knowledge of financial services, payments, or cryptocurrency industries.
• A strong understanding of security best practices for building enterprise applications.
• Proficiency in programming languages such as Solidity, Daml, Java, JavaScript, Rust, NodeJS, Go, or Python.

What we offer

• Competitive salary and benefits to support your mental, physical, financial, and social wellbeing in line with our Fair Pay Charter.
• 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 leave (20 weeks), sabbatical (12 months maximum), and volunteering leave (3 days), along with a minimum of 30 days combined annual and public holiday.
• 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, mental health first-aiders, and 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 that embraces and celebrates unique diversity across teams, business functions, and geographies.

About Standard Chartered Bank

Standard Chartered is an international bank with over 170 years of history, working to make a positive difference for clients, communities, and each other. The Bank drives commerce and prosperity through unique diversity and is committed to being here for good, underpinned by valued behaviours of doing the right thing, never settling, and being better together.