Job Summary
We are seeking a DLT architect to Shape and deliver the Bank’s global digital assets and DLT platform supporting tokenised deposits, digital asset custody, tokenised funds, stablecoins and digital-asset payments. Own end-to-end solution architecture across banking applications, blockchain networks, shared platform services and external providers, translating business requirements into secure, scalable, highly available and supportable solutions across public cloud, private cloud and on-premises infrastructure. Working with the Head of DLT, product, engineering, DevOps, SRE, Production Support, enterprise architecture, cyber-security and penetration-testing teams, guide solutions from discovery through production. Operate independently, make evidence-based technology decisions, and build architecture capability within India while setting the technical direction that enables each specialist team to deliver consistently.
Key Responsibilities
Architecture Ownership and Platform Strategy
- Own architecture across digital-asset initiatives, aligning business outcomes, CIB strategy, enterprise standards and the platform roadmap.
- Design reusable primitives for wallets, tokenisation, transaction orchestration, blockchain connectivity, compliance, counterparty management, identity and interoperability.
- Define service boundaries, application ownership, data responsibilities, integration contracts and dependencies across Bank-managed platforms and SaaS providers.
- Produce implementable solution designs, deployment views, sequence and transaction flows, threat models, data flows, NFRs and architecture decision records.
- Evaluate technologies through prototypes and evidence-based assessments of security, scalability, privacy, resilience, supportability, portability, cost and exit risk.
- Guide implementation, review critical designs and code/configuration, and verify that delivered solutions conform to approved architecture.
Digital Assets, Blockchain and Settlement
Architect issuance, minting, burning, transfer, redemption and reconciliation for tokenised deposits, funds, stablecoins and other digital assets.
Design institutional custody and wallet orchestration covering policy, approval, signing, submission, confirmation, recovery and reconciliation.
Define permissioned-network architecture across countries and regions, addressing governance, validator topology, privacy, consensus, finality and resilience.
Design integration with EVM and non-EVM networks, including nodes, RPC, event indexing, transaction lifecycle, confirmation and exception handling.
Architect cross-chain interoperability and integration with traditional payment and settlement systems, including delivery-versus-payment and payment-versus-payment.
Establish smart-contract architecture and lifecycle controls for permissions, upgradeability, testing, independent assurance, deployment and rollback.
Public, Private and Hybrid Cloud Architecture
Design deployment patterns across AWS/Azure public cloud, enterprise private cloud and on-premises environments.
Define multi-region architectures for availability, disaster recovery, data residency and country-specific constraints.
Specify Kubernetes, networking, DNS, certificates, storage, database, cache and Kafka/Solace messaging patterns appropriate to workload and control needs.
Design secure connectivity between Bank networks, clouds, blockchain platforms, custody services and SaaS providers.
Guide DevOps on Terraform modules, environment isolation, protected remote state, locking, policy-as-code, drift control and reliable reconstruction.
Ensure capacity, performance, operability, recoverability and cost are addressed in infrastructure design.
Security, Transaction Integrity and Penetration-Test Readiness
• Design end-to-end integrity through payload signing, identity binding, signature validation, replay protection, idempotency and auditable transaction processing.
• Define hot, warm and cold wallet architectures, HSM integration, key ceremonies, key lifecycle, backup and controlled recovery.
• Apply zero-trust principles, authentication, authorisation, workload identity, secrets management, least privilege and segregation of duties across hybrid environments.
• Protect key material and credentials across applications, infrastructure automation, pipelines, logs and operational tooling.
• Partner with cyber-security and penetration-testing teams to define threat models, attack surfaces and assurance scope across APIs, smart contracts, nodes, networks and platforms.
• Guide remediation of API and smart-contract weaknesses and require appropriate use of tools such as Burp Suite, Slither, Mythril, Foundry, Echidna, Manticore and Certora.
• Assess trust boundaries, vendor dependencies, screening, Travel Rule, transaction-policy controls and failure scenarios across internal and external components.
High Availability, SRE and Operational Readiness
• Define measurable requirements for availability, latency, throughput, transaction success, RTO and RPO, including alignment to the 99.995% target where applicable.
• Design for partial failure, retries, back-pressure, circuit breaking, idempotency, duplicate prevention and on-chain/off-chain reconciliation.
• Establish observability across infrastructure, application, integration, blockchain and business-transaction layers using metrics, logs, traces and synthetic monitoring.
• Guide SRE and PSS teams on predictive monitoring, anomaly detection, alert correlation, capacity forecasting, safe auto-healing and autoscaling.
• Design and validate recovery patterns supporting agreed 15-minute restoration objectives for defined critical scenarios.
• Ensure production readiness includes ownership, service maps, dependency maps, runbooks, on-call, escalation, DR tests and client-support procedures.
• Use incidents and post-incident reviews to drive permanent architectural improvements and eliminate recurring failure modes.
DevOps, Secure Delivery and AI-assisted Engineering
• Define architecture requirements for CI/CD, GitOps, Terraform, software supply-chain security, artefact signing, SBOM, progressive deployment and rollback.
• Ensure application, infrastructure and smart-contract releases include validation, traceability, segregation of duties and recovery controls.
• Apply approved AI and agentic tools to architecture analysis, prototyping, design review, documentation and option assessment.
• Assess AI-enabled monitoring and diagnostics for accuracy, confidentiality, explainability, operational value and human oversight.
• Require testing, review, traceability and control for AI-generated designs, code, infrastructure and production actions.
Guidance Across Engineering, DevOps, SRE and Security
• Set coherent technical standards and reference patterns that development, DevOps, SRE, Production Support and penetration-testing teams can implement and assure.
• Guide developers on Java/Spring Boot microservices, APIs, event-driven integration, transactional consistency, secure coding and resilient design.
• Guide DevOps on hybrid-cloud deployment, Kubernetes, Terraform, CI/CD, GitOps, platform security and infrastructure recovery.
• Guide SRE and production teams on SLIs/SLOs, observability, capacity, incident prevention, auto-healing, recovery and operational acceptance.
• Guide security and penetration-test teams on trust boundaries, test scope, smart-contract assurance, API security, cryptography, key management and remediation priorities.
• Resolve cross-team design conflicts and ensure control ownership and hand-offs are explicit from design through production.
Skills and Experience
- Typically 12+ years of technology experience with substantial ownership of enterprise solution architecture and production delivery.
- Proven delivery of highly available platforms in payments, financial markets, FX, custody, transaction banking or comparable regulated environments.
- Hands-on architecture of blockchain or digital-asset solutions spanning on-chain and off-chain components.
- Strong expertise in distributed systems, Core Java/Spring Boot microservices, APIs, event-driven integration, Kafka/Solace, databases and transactional consistency.
- Architecture across public cloud, private cloud and hybrid infrastructure, including Kubernetes, networks, identity, certificates and data residency.
- Working knowledge of Terraform and infrastructure-as-code sufficient to govern modules, state protection, security, drift and recovery.
- Deep understanding of digital signatures, PKI, wallet architecture, HSMs, key management, workload identity and enterprise security controls.
- Ability to define and validate NFRs, resilience, observability, penetration-test readiness and operational acceptance.
- Evidence of owning architecture through implementation, production readiness, go-live and operation.
- Strong independent judgement, governance communication, vendor challenge and technical mentoring.
Qualifications
• Masters or engineering background
About Standard Chartered
We're an international bank, nimble enough to act, big enough for impact. For more than 170 years, we've worked to make a positive difference for our clients, communities, and each other. We question the status quo, love a challenge and enjoy finding new opportunities to grow and do better than before. If you're looking for a career with purpose and you want to work for a bank making a difference, we want to hear from you. You can count on us to celebrate your unique talents and we can't wait to see the talents you can bring us.
Our purpose, to drive commerce and prosperity through our unique diversity, together with our brand promise, to be here for good are achieved by how we each live our valued behaviours. When you work with us, you'll see how we value difference and advocate inclusion.
Together we:
- Do the right thing and are assertive, challenge one another, and live with integrity, while putting the client at the heart of what we do
- Never settle, continuously striving to improve and innovate, keeping things simple and learning from doing well, and not so well
- Are better together, we can be ourselves, be inclusive, see more good in others, and work collectively to build for the long term
What we offer
In line with our Fair Pay Charter, we offer a competitive salary and benefits to support your mental, physical, financial and social wellbeing.
- Core bank funding for retirement savings, medical and life insurance, with flexible and voluntary benefits available in some locations.
- Time-off including annual leave, parental/maternity (20 weeks), sabbatical (12 months maximum) and volunteering leave (3 days), along with minimum global standards for annual and public holiday, which is combined to 30 days minimum.
- Flexible working options based around home and office locations, with flexible working patterns.
- Proactive wellbeing support through Unmind, a market-leading digital wellbeing platform, development courses for resilience and other human skills, global Employee Assistance Programme, sick leave, mental health first-aiders and all sorts of self-help toolkits
- A continuous learning culture to support your growth, with opportunities to reskill and upskill and access to physical, virtual and digital learning.
- Being part of an inclusive and values driven organisation, one that embraces and celebrates our unique diversity, across our teams, business functions and geographies - everyone feels respected and can realise their full potential.