Principal Software Engineer Distributed Systems (Singapore / China)

Job Summary

This role could be based in Singapore or China. When you start the application process you will be presented with a drop-down menu showing all countries, please ensure that you only select a country where the role is based

The Software Engineer - Distributed Systems designs, builds, and supports highly scalable, resilient, and secure services for critical transaction processing environments. The role focuses on solving complex engineering problems across service orchestration, data consistency, failure recovery, observability, and performance at scale, delivering robust, high-throughput, low-latency critical banking systems. The engineer will be part of a high-performing team focused on engineering excellence and delivery quality. Experience with Go or Java is required. Experience with durable execution platforms such as Temporal, DBOS, or similar frameworks is a strong bonus.

Key Responsibilities

Strategy

• Help shape the engineering direction for critical, high-availability distributed systems.

• Contribute to long-term thinking around scalability, resilience, maintainability, and platform evolution.

• Identify opportunities to simplify complex workflows, reduce operational risk, and improve delivery speed.

• Support adoption of better engineering practices, including automation, reusable patterns, and AI-assisted development where it adds value.

• Think beyond immediate implementation to ensure solutions are robust, future-ready, and aligned with evolving business needs.

• Bring structured problem-solving and strong critical thinking to ambiguous technical challenges.

• Promote engineering excellence, code quality, and operational discipline.

• Contribute to documentation, technical reviews, and continuous improvement activities.

• Undertake additional responsibilities as assigned within the scope of the role.

• Apply secure engineering practices in line with internal governance and compliance expectations.

• Build solutions that support integrity, reliability, traceability, and controlled operational behaviour.

Business

• Design and build distributed backend services for high-volume transaction processing.

• Develop scalable, fault-tolerant solutions for transaction-heavy systems.

• Implement resilient integration patterns across APIs, queues, streaming platforms, and internal services.

• Build strong validation, integrity, idempotency, and recovery mechanisms to support safe and consistent processing.

• Deliver solutions that improve availability, consistency, and operational resilience.

• Translate business and operational needs into well-structured technical implementations.

People and Talent

• Collaborate effectively with engineering peers and contribute to a positive, high-performance team culture.

• Share knowledge, learn continuously, and support skill development through strong technical contribution and example.

• Demonstrate self-driven ownership, curiosity, and a strong can-do attitude.

• Work constructively with others to solve hard technical problems and deliver against commitments.

Governance

• Follow engineering standards, design principles, and delivery practices that support safe and reliable execution.

• Apply disciplined software development practices, including testing, code quality, and maintainability.

• Support the use of AI development tools responsibly through sound engineering judgement and hardening practices.

• Maintain clear decision-making, traceability, and accountability in technical delivery.

Regulatory and 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, including regulatory and business conduct, across Standard Chartered Bank. This includes understanding and ensuring compliance with, in letter and spirit, all applicable laws, regulations, guidelines and the Group Code of Conduct.

• Effectively and collaboratively identify, escalate, mitigate and resolve risk, conduct and compliance matters.

Key stakeholders

• Work with product, platform, engineering, and delivery stakeholders to ensure solutions meet technical and operational needs.

• Engage with relevant technical partners to align on implementation approach, dependencies, and delivery outcomes.

• Communicate clearly on progress, risks, and technical decisions.

• Build effective working relationships across teams to support delivery of complex engineering outcomes.

Other Responsibilities

• Embrace and practise SCB’s brand promise of Here for Good and corporate values

• Perform other responsibilities assigned under Group, Country, Business or Functional policies and procedures

• Responsible for building a culture of good conduct

Our Ideal Candidate

• 10+ years experience in software engineering background with hands-on experience in Go or Java.

• Proven experience designing and building distributed systems or high-availability backend services.

• Strong software architecture experience, with the ability to design scalable, resilient, and maintainable distributed systems.

• Solid knowledge of software design patterns and the ability to apply them effectively in real-world engineering solutions.

• Solid understanding of concurrency, service-to-service communication, and failure handling.

• Experience with high-throughput, low-latency, and resilient system design.

• Familiarity with transactional consistency, idempotency, retries, and recovery patterns.

• Experience working in environments with strict reliability, observability, and operational requirements.

• Experience working on critical financial or transaction-intensive systems is highly desirable.

• Experience with durable execution frameworks (for example Temporal, DBOS, or similar) is a strong bonus.

• Strong critical thinking and problem-solving skills.

• Familiarity with AI-assisted development tools and workflows.

• Experience with AI hardening design, including safe, reliable, and controlled use of AI in engineering workflows.

• Self-driven, curious, and optimistic with a strong can-do attitude.

• Good communication skills and a collaborative engineering mindset.

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

Role Specific Technical Competencies

• Software Engineering

• Software Development

• Application Design

• Architecture

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.

Recruitment Assessments

Some of our roles use assessments to help us understand how suitable you are for the role you've applied to. If you are invited to take an assessment, this is great news. It means your application has progressed to an important stage of our recruitment process.

Visit our careers website www.sc.com/careers