Building the Fastest Digital Product Engineering Capability in Banking
Executive-Level Contributor Role
Role Overview
We are seeking an exceptional leader to drive: making speed our strategic weapon. This role will own end-to-end engineering velocity—from idea to production—across our entire digital product organisation. You will eliminate the waste (high!) in our deployment pipeline, reduce our multi-day lead time to hours, and build one of the fastest, most efficient digital product engineering teams in banking.
This is not a traditional management role. You will be a hands-on architect of organisational and technical systems, working at the intersection of engineering excellence, organisational design, and cultural transformation. You will eat, sleep, and breathe deployment velocity, developer experience, and flow efficiency.
The Mission
Transform our product and engineering organisation to enable multiple deployments per day — safely, reliably, and at scale - with a lead time for change measured in hours.
In our world where everything is digital, our speed from idea to business value is our primary competitive weapon.
Your mandate is to fix this and keep iterating until we are the best.
Key Responsibilities
1. Own Velocity Metrics End-to-End
Define, instrument, and drive metrics across all 56+ PODs.
Build real-time dashboards showing flow efficiency, bottlenecks, and trends
Establish speed as a first-class KPI
Report directly to Group COO on velocity improvements and blockers
2. Eliminate Deployment Pipeline Waste
Reduce the wait time by automating manual confirmations, approvals, and handoffs
Design and implement progressive rollout strategies with automated rollback
Build automated testing frameworks that eliminate hours of manual test confirmation
Work with Control functions to shift left into the pipeline
3. Architect for Flow Across 56+ PODs
Understand dependencies across PODs
Identify and eliminate coordination bottlenecks between PODs
Design self-service platform capabilities to reduce dependency on PODs
Transform CAB approval process from manual gate to automated guardrails
Establish risk-based deployment strategies (not all changes need same approval rigor)
4. Enable Platform Teams for Maximum Impact
Partner with Pipeline \& DevEx POD to build world-class deployment automation
Work with Testing Automation POD to create comprehensive, fast, reliable test suites
Collaborate with Platform \& Cloud POD on infrastructure-as-code and ephemeral environments
Guide Incident Management POD toward predictive alerting and auto-remediation
Ensure platform investments directly reduce deployment lead time
5. Prepare for AI Agent Deployment at Scale
Recognize that AI agents are software workers requiring rapid iteration
Design deployment pipelines that support rapid deployment frequency
Ensure infrastructure can handle multiple deployments per day across all PODs
Build observability and rollback capabilities for AI agent updates
Requirements
Essential Experience
10+ years in software engineering and DevOps with deep hands-on technical expertise
Experience in MLOps and awareness of LLMOps
Proven track record of reducing deployment lead time in complex organisations
Experience working in organisations with 500+ engineers across multiple teams/PODs and Geographies
Deep understanding of flow and velocity metrics, Team Topologies, and flow efficiency
Hands-on experience with modern CI/CD and MLflow tools
Expertise in cloud infrastructure (AWS), containers and IaC
Experience building observability and monitoring systems
Highly Valued Experience
Banking, fintech, or highly regulated industry experience
Led DevOps transformation in organisation that achieved elite metrics
Built or scaled platform engineering teams
Experience with microservices architectures and event-driven systems
Knowledge of compliance automation and shift-left security practices
Awareness in SRE (Site Reliability Engineering) principles
Required Skills \& Competencies
Systems thinking: Ability to see the entire value stream and identify constraint points
Data-driven decision making: Obsessive about metrics, measurement, and continuous improvement
Influence without authority: Can drive change across 56+ PODs without direct reporting lines
Executive communication: Can present complex technical concepts to C-suite audiences
Bias toward action: Moves fast, experiments, learns, iterates
Technical credibility: Engineers respect you because you've done the work
Cultural sensitivity: Can work with traditional banking functions (Compliance, Risk, Legal)
Relentless focus: This is not a side project—you live and breathe velocity
Benefits
Why This Role Matters
This is a once-in-a-career opportunity to:
Transform an entire banking organisation's approach to software delivery
Have executive-level visibility and influence without traditional management overhead
Work at the bleeding edge of DevOps, MLOps and LLMOps excellence in a complex, regulated environment
Build systems that will power AI agent deployment at unprecedented scale
Directly impact customer experience through faster product iterations
Make speed a strategic weapon and competitive advantage
Establish yourself as a thought leader in banking DevOps, MLOps /and LLMOps transformation
If you are energized by the challenge of taking a deployment cycle to \<4 hours and building one of the fastest digital product engineering operations in banking—this role is for you.