Executive Director, Head of Full Stack Engineering - Asia Pacific Division

Role Overview

As the Head of Full Stack Engineering for SMBC Asia Pacific, you will lead the strategic transformation of the digital banking offering for corporate clients across 12 countries in the region.  You will build out a high performing full-stack engineering capability to reduce reliance on vendors and drive the renovation and transfer of ownership for the core Asia Pacific client channels platform from head office in Tokyo, leveraging SMBC’s Global Capability Center in India.  You will drive innovation, scalability, and operational excellence, closely collaborating with global and regional stakeholders to deliver a cloud native, API first, architecture to support business growth and regulatory compliance.

Key Responsibilities:

• Lead the renovation and enhancement of capabilities for SMBC’s digital banking offering across 12 APAC locations to improve client experience by delivering a cloud native, scalable platform which can be flexibly enhanced and deployed to support business growth.
• Partner with front office product owners to define, prioritize and deliver future platform capabilities aligned with strategic business goals in an agile delivery model.
• Collaborate with global and regional stakeholders to implement engineering best practices and enhanced developer experience across the organization in compliance with internal policies and regulatory expectations.
• Build-out an a high performing full-stack engineering capability in APAC with DevOps & SRE capabilities for the new client channels platform, optimizing resourcing through SMBC’s Global Capability Center in India.
• Attract, mentor, and retain strong technical talent, fostering a culture of innovation, accountability, and continuous improvement to enhance SMBC’s brand as an engineering organization.
• Champion automation, quality engineering and reliability as core delivery principles and drive consistency in engineering practices (coding standards, testing, CI/CD, observability, security, etc.).
• Oversee systems integration with core banking, payments, identity and data platforms and externalization of API services enabling seamless integration for corporate clients and third-party partners.
• Continuously improve platform stability, enforce robust system controls, and ensure full compliance with regulatory standards, security protocols, and internal governance frameworks.

Requirements:

• Minimum 10 years’ experience in digital banking departmental leadership roles for financial services organizations in Asia Pacific.
• Proven leadership experience in modernization of channels architectures and achieving smooth platform roll-outs across multiple locations for large, complex banks.
• Demonstrated success in managing large, cross-functional, multi-geography teams and building effective offshore delivery and support capabilities.
• Experience in managing a sizable budget and continuously optimizing both delivery and running costs for a standardized digital banking platform across multiple onshore locations.
• Deep knowledge of core banking software solutions (eg. T24, Finacle) and experience effectively managing vendors to get the most out of the product.
• Strong knowledge of engineering best practices, leveraging cloud technologies, agile frameworks, DevOps, and API services.
• In-depth understanding of regulatory requirements and operational risk management in banking environments, especially for client channels.
• Strong stakeholder management, communication, and influencing skills to lead change and foster collaboration.