Retail Platform Principal Engineer

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 Retail Platform Principal Engineer

Business: WPS Technology

Responsibilities

• Provide strategic technical leadership across engineering projects, ensuring alignment with business goals, architecture principles and regulatory/compliance requirements.
• Architect and design scalable, resilient, secure microservices and event‑driven systems to support high‑throughput financial services workloads.
• Lead adoption and governance of engineering standards, patterns and best practices (API design, domain‑driven design, CI/CD).
• Hands‑on development and code review in core platforms; set standards for software craftsmanship across Morden Tech stacks and cloud‑native services.
• Mentor and coach senior engineers and engineering leads; run regular technical deep dives, architecture reviews and cross‑team workshops.
• Lead and facilitate blameless post‑mortems and structured root cause analysis (RCA), driving remediation plans and lessons learned into the development lifecycle.
• Own the Tech Risk Control “book of work”: maintain backlog of control remediation tasks, coordinate with Risk/Compliance to define mitigations, track progress, and ensure audit readiness.
• Drive the integration of AI/ML capabilities into production systems with appropriate controls for governance, model risk, explainability and data privacy.
• Collaborate with product, security, ops and data teams to prioritise technical debt, reliability improvements and platform investments.
• Represent engineering in stakeholder forums, technical governance boards and external partner engagements.

What you will be doing

• Act as the technical owner for core platform domains, driving architecture, design and delivery across backend, data streaming and cloud infrastructure; focus deeply on 2–3 areas (e.g., Java/Spring, Kafka/Stream Processing, Cloud/Kubernetes).
• Lead targeted technical deep‑dives (2–3 per quarter) to resolve architectural trade‑offs, eliminate chronic pain points and transfer knowledge across teams.
• Own and deliver the Tech Risk Control book‑of‑work items for your area: define remediations, coordinate cross‑functional delivery, produce evidence for audits and close out controls.
• Run structured root‑cause analysis and blameless post‑mortems for major incidents, translate findings into prioritized fixes, and ensure follow‑through.
• Provide hands‑on technical direction: participate in design reviews, code reviews, prototyping and proof‑of‑concepts to validate architecture decisions.
• Mentor senior engineers and engineering leads; raise team capability through coaching, workshops and documented standards/patterns.
• Collaborate with product, security, data and ops to align technical strategy with business objectives, regulatory requirements and non‑functional goals (scalability, resilience, security).
• Drive adoption of cloud‑native and DevOps practices (CI/CD, observability) and ensure production readiness for new services and AI/ML components.

Qualifications

Certifications & Education

• University degree in Computer Science, Engineering or related discipline; MSc/PhD preferred.
• Cloud certification(s) strongly preferred: AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional or DevOps Engineer, Microsoft Certified: Azure Solutions Architect, or Google Professional Cloud Architect.
• Desirable: Kubernetes (CKA/CKAD), security or data governance certificates.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in financial services or regulated industries with demonstrable knowledge of regulatory controls, audit preparation and model risk governance.
• Contributions to open source projects or academic/industry research; speaker at technical conferences is a plus.
• Proven ability to lead cross‑functional engineering teams through technological transformations, and to operationalise AI safely at scale.

Deliverables & Success Measures

• Architecture and platform designs that meet non‑functional requirements (scalability, resiliency, security).
• Successful delivery of prioritized Tech Risk Control book‑of‑work items and remediation actions.
• Reduction in incident mean‑time‑to‑detect and mean‑time‑to‑recover through improved observability, RCA and runbooks.
• Mature AI/ML deployment pipelines with documented governance, monitoring and model lifecycle controls.
• High team engagement, evidence of knowledge transfer via deep dive sessions and measurable uplift in engineering capability.

Technical Skills & Experience

Familiar on one or more tech skill.

• Strong Java expertise (Java 8/11/17/21/25), demonstrated through large‑scale, production systems.
• Deep experience with Spring ecosystem: Spring Boot, Spring Cloud, Spring Security, Spring Data and related tooling.
• Microservices and cloud‑native architectures: containerisation (Docker), orchestration (Kubernetes), service mesh (Istio/Linkerd) and 12‑factor app principles.
• Event streaming and messaging: Apache Kafka (Kafka Streams, ksqlDB), Confluent tooling and best practices for exactly‑once semantics and fault‑tolerant processing.
• Data platform familiarity: batch/stream processing (Spark, Flink), data lakehouse concepts (Delta Lake), and data governance tools (e.g. Apache Atlas, Apache Falcon or equivalent).
• AI / ML / LLM productionisation: hands‑on with MLOps and Model frameworks (LangGraph, Agent Development Kit, Microsoft Agent Framework ); experience deploying and operating LLMs (e.g., Falcon family or other LLMs), embeddings, RAG architectures and frameworks (LangChain, LlamaIndex).
• Observability, reliability and performance engineering: Prometheus/Grafana, ELK/EFK, distributed tracing (Jaeger/Zipkin), profiling and tuning high‑throughput systems.
• DevOps, CI/CD :Terraform, Ansible , G3 , and SonarQube.
• Cloud platforms: proven experience on at least one major public cloud (AWS, Azure or GCP) in production scale environments.
• Security, compliance & risk controls: secure coding practices, threat modelling, encryption, key management and OWASP mitigation patterns.

You’ll achieve more at 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***