Head of Engineering Practices

Shape how engineering gets done - at scale at HSBC

HSBC is one of the world’s largest banking and financial services organisations, serving millions of customers through our global network. We connect customers to opportunities across international markets, supporting individuals, businesses and institutions with a broad range of banking and wealth services. At HSBC, we’re focused on opening up a world of opportunity by helping people and businesses thrive and economies prosper.
We’re looking for a senior engineering leader at Director level to raise the engineering baseline across GCIO. This role is about defining what “good” looks like, building the enablement capability to help teams adopt it, and proving progress through clear, measurable maturity outcomes. You’ll help teams move faster with confidence - improving quality, resilience, security, and delivery effectiveness - while keeping governance pragmatic and automation-led.

What you’ll be doing

Lead engineering maturity uplift across GCIO

• Define an engineering maturity framework (capabilities, levels, measurable indicators) spanning SDLC, DevSecOps, CI/CD, quality engineering, reliability, and operational excellence.
• Baseline current maturity, identify priority gaps, and agree uplift plans with engineering leaders.
• Drive adoption through coaching, playbooks, reference implementations, and targeted interventions where teams need support.
• Establish a sustainable cadence for maturity reviews, progress tracking, and continuous improvement.

Build the enablement model and communities that scale

• Build and grow a small central team of engineering practice leads, plus a federated network of chapter leads/champions.
• Establish and run communities of practice across disciplines (e.g., backend, frontend, mobile, data, SRE, DevSecOps, QA/Testing, architecture).
• Create operating rhythms that drive reuse of patterns, accelerate decision-making, and reduce duplicated effort - ensuring inclusive participation across locations and seniority.

Strengthen technical leadership and capability

• Shepherd the Principal Engineer and Distinguished Engineer programmes (role expectations, assessment approach, governance cadence, community health).
• Partner with HR/L&D and engineering leadership to shape training pathways from graduate to senior leadership.
• Embed mentoring, coaching, and knowledge-sharing to strengthen career pathways and technical leadership.

Use data to drive outcomes

• Define and track maturity KPIs and engineering health metrics (e.g., DORA, change failure rate, MTTR, compliance-by-design).
• Use insights to prioritise investment, remove systemic bottlenecks, and demonstrate measurable uplift.
• Provide clear updates to senior stakeholders on progress, risks, and dependencies.

What we’re looking for

Essential

• Senior engineering leadership experience driving organisation-wide practice uplift and change.
• Strong knowledge of modern SDLC, DevSecOps, CI/CD, quality engineering, and reliability practices.
• Proven ability to build scalable enablement models - coaching, communities of practice, playbooks.
• Experience designing or running technical leadership/career programmes and engineering training initiatives.
• Experience operating in regulated environments with strong risk and control expectations.
• Data-driven approach to maturity assessment, prioritisation, and benefits realisation.
• Strong stakeholder management and influencing skills across platform, security, architecture, and delivery.

Desirable

• Experience designing maturity frameworks and running enterprise-wide improvement programmes.
• Experience partnering with platform engineering on internal developer platforms - golden paths.
• Familiarity with cloud-native engineering and modern observability tooling.

Ready to raise the bar?

If you’re passionate about improving engineering outcomes through practical standards, scalable enablement and measurable maturity uplift (and you can bring people with you) - apply now to join us in shaping how engineering gets done across GCIO.

Being open to different points of view is important for our business and the communities we serve. At HSBC, we’re dedicated to creating diverse and inclusive workplaces - no matter their gender, ethnicity, disability, religion, sexual orientation, or age. We are committed to removing barriers and ensuring careers at HSBC are inclusive and accessible for everyone to be at their best. We take pride in being a Disability Confident Leader and will offer an interview to people with disabilities, long term conditions or neurodivergent candidates who meet the minimum criteria for the role.

If you have a need that requires accommodations or changes during the recruitment process, please get in touch with our Recruitment Helpdesk:

Email: hsbc.recruitment@hsbc.com
Telephone: +44 207 832 8500