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Our GCIO organisation plays a critical role for the bank. This team partners with the businesses to build the platforms, systems, and products that our customers use every day. We keep people’s money and data safe, and are at the forefront of driving innovation for our businesses, customers, and colleagues.
We are currently seeking an experienced professional to join our team in the role of CTOi CIB Cloud lead.
Role purpose
The Head of CIB Cloud is accountable for the strategy, governance, engineering standards, adoption and operational management of cloud services across all CIB functions globally.
The role will lead the development of a consistent, resilient and cost-effective cloud capability across CIB, working in close partnership with the central CTO Cloud team to support platform build, adoption and standardisation. The role will provide senior leadership across FinOps, infrastructure management, risk and controls, regulatory requirements, cloud architecture, solution design and engineering practices.
Acting as the primary cloud face-off for CIB Technology, business stakeholders, central CTO functions and relevant control and regulatory forums, the role will ensure that cloud services support business priorities while meeting HSBC’s risk appetite, resilience expectations, regulatory obligations and technology standards.
The role will lead both direct and virtual teams across regions, markets and CIB functions, creating common practices and enabling engineers to work consistently across cloud platforms and services.
Key accountabilities
1. Cloud strategy and leadership
- Define and execute the CIB cloud strategy, aligned to the wider CTO, CIB and Group technology strategies.
- Establish a clear target state for cloud adoption, platform usage, operating models and engineering capability across all CIB functions globally.
- Lead the transition towards consistent, scalable and reusable cloud services.
- Provide senior leadership and direction to CIB cloud engineering, architecture, infrastructure and governance communities.
- Set objectives and key results for direct and virtual teams, ensuring delivery is measurable and aligned to business outcomes.
- Act as the senior escalation point for CIB cloud-related matters, incidents, risks, delivery challenges and strategic decisions.
- Promote simplification, automation, resilience and secure-by-design principles across the CIB cloud estate.
2. FinOps and financial management
- Own the CIB cloud FinOps agenda, ensuring transparent, accurate and effective management of cloud consumption and costs.
- Establish governance for cloud financial management, including budgeting, forecasting, chargeback or showback, cost allocation and variance management.
- Drive optimisation opportunities across compute, storage, networking, licensing, data services and managed cloud platforms.
- Ensure cloud investment decisions are supported by robust business cases, value assessments and total-cost-of-ownership analysis.
- Work with Finance, Procurement, Technology and business stakeholders to improve cost visibility and accountability.
- Embed cost-conscious engineering practices across cloud teams without compromising resilience, security, performance or regulatory obligations.
- Track and report cloud financial performance, savings, avoidance and optimisation outcomes to senior stakeholders.
3. Infrastructure and service management
- Provide strategic oversight of cloud infrastructure and associated technology services supporting CIB globally.
- Ensure cloud platforms and workloads meet agreed standards for availability, capacity, performance, resilience, recoverability and operational support.
- Oversee the management of cloud infrastructure lifecycles, including engineering, migration, patching, upgrades, technology renewal and decommissioning.
- Work with service management, operations, cyber security, engineering and architecture teams to ensure effective end-to-end ownership.
- Ensure cloud services are supported by appropriate monitoring, observability, incident management, problem management and service-level reporting.
- Lead the resolution of major or recurring cloud infrastructure issues and ensure lessons learned are applied across the estate.
- Support large-scale cloud migration and transformation programmes, including sequencing, dependency management and operational readiness.
4. Risk, controls and resilience
- Own the CIB cloud risk and control agenda, ensuring technology controls are implemented, evidenced and managed in line with Group expectations.
- Represent CIB in relevant risk, control, resilience, architecture and technology governance forums.
- Maintain effective relationships with control owners, second-line risk partners, Internal Audit and other assurance functions.
- Ensure cloud risks are identified, assessed, documented, tracked and managed to an appropriate conclusion.
- Establish consistent approaches to cloud risk assessments, control design, control testing, issue management and remediation.
- Ensure cloud services support operational resilience, including dependency mapping, recovery planning, testing, scenario analysis and tolerance compliance.
- Take a pragmatic, risk-based approach to decision-making while maintaining appropriate escalation and transparency.
- Ensure material cloud risks, control weaknesses and resilience concerns are communicated clearly to senior management.
5. Regulatory requirements and external face-off
- Provide senior technology input into regulatory engagements, reviews, audits and information requests relating to cloud services and infrastructure.
- Advise CIB leadership on the impact of regulatory requirements on cloud architecture, operating models, outsourcing, resilience, data, security and service management.
- Work closely with Legal, Compliance, Risk, Regulatory Relations, Cyber Security and relevant technology teams to ensure regulatory obligations are understood and addressed.
- Ensure the CIB cloud operating model supports applicable requirements for technology risk management, operational resilience, third-party risk, data management and record retention.
- Act as a credible technology representative in regulatory and assurance discussions, translating complex cloud arrangements into clear and evidence-based explanations.
- Ensure regulatory findings and commitments are owned, prioritised and delivered within agreed timescales.
6. Business and stakeholder engagement
- Act as the primary cloud face-off for CIB business leaders, CIOs, COOs, product owners and technology leadership.
- Build trusted relationships across all CIB functions, regions and markets, ensuring cloud priorities reflect business needs.
- Translate business requirements into practical, secure and scalable cloud strategies and solutions.
- Explain technical risks, trade-offs, costs and delivery implications in clear and accessible language.
- Represent CIB requirements within central CTO, cloud, architecture, infrastructure, security and service management forums.
- Ensure stakeholders receive clear updates on cloud adoption, service performance, costs, risks, controls and strategic priorities.
- Work collaboratively across organisational boundaries to resolve issues and deliver outcomes.
7. Cloud solutioning and architecture
- Provide leadership and oversight for cloud solutioning across CIB, from early business demand through to implementation and operational adoption.
- Ensure proposed solutions align with approved cloud strategies, reference architectures, security requirements, design standards and regulatory expectations.
- Challenge designs constructively to improve resilience, reuse, cost efficiency, operability and maintainability.
- Promote standardised, repeatable and automated patterns for cloud adoption and workload deployment.
- Ensure architecture decisions are appropriately documented, governed and communicated.
- Support the selection and effective use of public cloud, private cloud, hybrid and associated platform services.
- Ensure solutions address data protection, identity and access management, network security, encryption, logging, monitoring, recovery and third-party dependencies.
- Work closely with enterprise, domain, security and infrastructure architects to manage architectural alignment and exceptions.
8. Engineering standards and common practices
- Define and maintain common cloud engineering standards, patterns, guardrails and ways of working across CIB.
- Drive consistent practices for infrastructure as code, continuous integration and delivery, automation, observability, security, resilience and environment management.
- Establish communities of practice and technical forums to share knowledge and promote engineering consistency.
- Identify opportunities to simplify the cloud estate and reduce unnecessary variation between teams, regions and platforms.
- Develop and maintain reusable components, reference implementations and approved patterns.
- Promote continuous improvement, automation and self-service capabilities for cloud engineers and application teams.
- Ensure standards remain current as cloud technologies, regulatory expectations and Group policies evolve.
- Measure adoption of standards and address material exceptions through an effective governance process.
9. Partnership with the central CTO Cloud team
- Work closely with the central CTO Cloud team on cloud platform build, capability development and service adoption.
- Represent CIB requirements in the prioritisation and evolution of central cloud platforms and services.
- Support the definition of platform roadmaps, onboarding models, service catalogues, guardrails and adoption plans.
- Coordinate CIB participation in platform pilots, migrations, engineering enablement and technology improvements.
- Promote standardisation on approved Group platforms and services wherever they meet CIB requirements.
- Identify gaps between central platform capabilities and CIB needs, agreeing pragmatic solutions and investment priorities.
- Ensure platform changes are effectively communicated, adopted and embedded across CIB engineering communities.
- Establish feedback loops between CIB users and the central CTO Cloud team to improve platform quality and usability.
10. Leadership and capability development
- Lead direct and virtual teams distributed across locations, functions and regions.
- Build a collaborative and inclusive cloud engineering community across CIB.
- Set clear expectations for accountability, delivery, risk management and professional development.
- Develop cloud skills through coaching, communities of practice, technical learning and targeted capability plans.
- Encourage diverse perspectives and cross-boundary collaboration when making technology decisions.
- Identify critical skills, succession requirements and opportunities to improve workforce capability.
- Promote a culture in which engineers take ownership for service quality, cost, risk, controls and customer outcomes.
- Ensure teams operate with appropriate capacity, role clarity and delivery discipline.
11. Transformation and strategic change
- Support CIB technology transformation initiatives involving cloud adoption, infrastructure modernisation, application migration, data platforms and engineering productivity.
- Provide cloud leadership for major programmes, ensuring dependencies, risks, costs and operational impacts are understood.
- Ensure transformation outcomes are sustainable and embedded into the target operating model.
- Balance speed of delivery with security, resilience, regulatory compliance and long-term maintainability.
- Track benefits realisation and ensure cloud transformation delivers measurable business and technology value.
Knowledge, experience and qualifications
- Significant experience leading cloud, infrastructure, platform engineering or technology transformation teams within a large, complex and regulated organisation.
- Extensive knowledge of public cloud, hybrid cloud and underlying infrastructure technologies, including networking, compute, storage, databases, identity, security, monitoring, resilience and automation.
- Strong experience of cloud architecture, solution design, design governance and the implementation of enterprise-scale technology standards.
- Proven experience establishing or operating FinOps capabilities, including cost governance, optimisation, forecasting and financial accountability.
- Strong understanding of technology risk, control frameworks, operational resilience, audit and regulatory expectations.
- Experience representing technology organisations in regulatory reviews, risk forums, audit engagements or formal assurance activities.
- Experience working with central cloud platform teams to build, adopt, govern and standardise enterprise cloud services.
- Proven ability to lead large, geographically distributed direct and virtual teams.
- Experience delivering major cloud migration, infrastructure modernisation or technology transformation programmes.
- Strong understanding of engineering practices such as infrastructure as code, continuous integration and delivery, automation, observability and platform engineering.
- Ability to balance strategic direction with sufficient technical depth to challenge designs and make sound decisions.
- Excellent communication and influencing skills, with the ability to engage confidently with executives, engineers, business stakeholders, risk partners, auditors and regulators.
- Ability to translate complex technical information into concise, decision-ready advice.
- Demonstrable experience simplifying technology estates, improving resilience, increasing automation and reducing cost.
- A pragmatic, accountable and risk-aware approach to problem-solving and decision-making.
- A strong interest in emerging cloud technologies and the ability to assess their practical value in a regulated enterprise environment.
Key relationships
- Head of CTOi – CIB and HCIB
- CIB Technology leadership and CIO community
- CIB business and COO stakeholders
- Central CTO Cloud team
- Enterprise, domain and solution architecture
- Infrastructure, engineering, cyber security and service management
- Finance, Procurement and vendor management
- Risk, Compliance, Legal and Regulatory Relations
- Internal Audit and external assurance providers
- Cloud service providers and strategic technology partners
Measures of success
- Delivery and adoption of the CIB cloud strategy and target state.
- Improved visibility, governance and optimisation of cloud expenditure.
- Increased use of approved, standardised and reusable cloud platforms and patterns.
- Reduction in unnecessary technology variation, operational risk and control exceptions.
- Strong cloud service availability, resilience, recoverability and operational performance.
- Timely and effective management of cloud risks, audit actions, regulatory commitments and control issues.
- Positive outcomes from regulatory, audit and assurance engagements.
- Improved engineering productivity through automation, self-service and common practices.
- Effective partnership with the central CTO Cloud team and demonstrable adoption of Group cloud platforms.
- Strong engagement, capability development and accountability across the CIB cloud engineering community.
- Successful delivery of cloud migration and transformation outcomes within agreed cost, risk and delivery parameters.
Location
The role can be based in the UK, with Sheffield as the preferred location/ HK, India and will require regular engagement with colleagues and stakeholders across CIB globally. Some international travel may be required in line with business needs.
Opening up a world of opportunity
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