Director, AI Architecture

STANDARD CHARTERED BANK; Singapore; On-site; SGD 180,000 - 280,000; Full time

Job summary

Standard Chartered Bank is seeking a Director of AI Architecture in Singapore to define and govern the bank's enterprise AI platform architecture. This role leads the foundational technology stack for AI adoption at scale, including execution substrates, control planes, model serving, and data architecture.

You will set enterprise standards and governance for secure, scalable AI deployments across the bank.

Qualifications

• 15+ years of experience in software engineering, platform architecture, data architecture, or distributed systems engineering.

Responsibilities

• Define and drive the Bank's long-term AI platform strategy, architecture vision, and technology roadmap.
• Establish enterprise architecture standards, patterns, and reusable frameworks for AI platform adoption.
• Lead architecture reviews and design authority forums for AI-related initiatives.
• Collaborate with engineering, data, infrastructure, cybersecurity, and risk teams to deliver scalable AI services.
• Drive governance, security, and regulatory compliance in AI platform deployment.

Skills

Distributed systems

Data architecture

AI platform engineering

Enterprise governance

Technical leadership

Job description

Job Summary

The Director, AI Architecture is accountable for defining and governing the Bank's enterprise AI platform architecture. This role owns the foundational technology stack that enables AI adoption at scale, including the execution substrate, control plane, model serving infrastructure, and underlying data architecture.

The role holder will establish enterprise standards, architectural principles, and governance frameworks that enable secure, scalable, resilient, and compliant deployment of AI capabilities across the Bank. The individual will work across business, technology, data, cybersecurity, risk, and engineering teams to create a reusable AI platform that supports agentic systems, generative AI, machine learning, and future intelligent automation capabilities.

The successful candidate will be a recognized technical authority with deep expertise in distributed systems, data architecture, AI platform engineering, and enterprise governance within highly regulated environments.

Key Responsibilities

Strategy

• Define and drive the Bank's long-term AI platform strategy, architecture vision, and technology roadmap.
• Establish enterprise architecture standards, patterns, and reusable frameworks for AI platform adoption.
• Shape the evolution of the Bank's agentic AI ecosystem, ensuring scalability, resilience, governance, and regulatory compliance.
• Advise senior executives and technology leadership on strategic AI platform investments and architectural decisions.
• Drive technology standardization while balancing innovation, operational efficiency, and risk management.

Business

• Act as the principal architect for the Bank's enterprise AI platform.
• Define and govern platform interfaces, service boundaries, data contracts, and operational controls.
• Lead architecture reviews and design authority forums for AI-related initiatives.
• Collaborate with engineering, data, infrastructure, cybersecurity, and risk teams to deliver scalable AI services.
• Support adoption of AI capabilities across business functions through reusable platform services and reference architectures.
• Drive multi-provider AI model strategies that optimize performance, resilience, portability, and cost.

Processes

• Design and govern distributed execution architectures supporting agentic and AI-enabled workloads.
• Establish standards for orchestration, durable workflows, agent state management, and tool integration.
• Define enterprise approaches for model deployment, evaluation, observability, monitoring, and lifecycle management.
• Create canonical data models and semantic layers across heterogeneous enterprise data domains.
• Govern architecture decisions relating to lakehouse platforms, object storage, graph databases, vector stores, and NoSQL technologies.
• Lead architecture decision record (ADR) development and architecture review board submissions.

People & Talent

• Provide technical leadership and mentorship across architecture, engineering, and data teams.
• Develop architectural capability within the organization through coaching, standards, and knowledge sharing.
• Influence technology direction across teams without direct reporting authority.
• Foster a culture of engineering excellence, innovation, and architectural discipline.

Risk Management

• Ensure AI platform architecture align with enterprise risk management frameworks.
• Embed security, privacy, auditability, explainability, and resiliency principles into platform design.
• Define controls supporting sovereign deployment requirements and data localization obligations.
• Drive architecture patterns that mitigate operational, technology, cyber, and model risks.

Governance

• Establish and enforce enterprise-wide architecture standards for AI systems.
• Drive governance frameworks covering identity, authorization, tool access, routing, audit, and usage controls.
• Partner with Risk, Compliance, Legal, and Information Security teams to ensure regulatory compliance.
• Provide evidence and architectural assurance for internal governance and regulatory reviews.

Regulatory & Business Conduct

• Display exemplary conduct and live by the Group's Values and Code of Conduct.
• Take personal responsibility for embedding the highest standards of ethics, regulatory compliance, and business conduct across Standard Chartered Bank.
• Ensure compliance with all applicable laws, regulations, internal policies, and technology governance requirements.
• Effectively identify, assess, mitigate, and resolve risk, conduct, and compliance matters associated with AI platforms and services.

Our Ideal Candidate

• 15+ years of experience in software engineering, platform architecture, data architecture, or distributed systems engineering, with a strong track record of building enterprise-scale platforms.
• Proven experience designing and evolving enterprise platforms that support multiple engineering teams and business