SVP / VP, Enterprise Architect, EASRE, Technology & Operations

DBS is a leading financial services group in Asia, with over 280 branches across 18 markets. Headquartered and listed in Singapore, DBS has a growing presence in the three key Asian axes of growth: Greater China, Southeast Asia and South Asia. The bank's capital position, as well as "AA-" and "Aa1" credit ratings, is among the highest in Asia-Pacific. DBS has been recognised for its leadership in the region, having been named “Asia’s Best Bank” by The Banker, a member of the Financial Times group, and “Best Bank in Asia-Pacific” by Global Finance. The bank has also been named “Safest Bank in Asia” by Global Finance for seven consecutive years from 2009 to 2015.

Business Function
Group Technology and Operations (T&O) enables and empowers the bank with an efficient, nimble and resilient infrastructure through a strategic focus on productivity, quality & control, technology, people capability and innovation. In Group T&O, we manage the majority of the Bank's operational processes and inspire to delight our business partners through our multiple banking delivery channels.

In our digital transformation journey ahead, we intend to build loosely coupled but tightly aligned components that are built expecting to be reused for repeatability and consistency while being able response to changes quickly.

Our systems and applications must adopt common services, platforms, architectural principles, and design patterns. There is a need for an overarching strategy, architecture roadmap that enables our engineering teams to design and build new capabilities & features that are aligned to an end-state vision of how these systems and applications will operate within this architecture framework and being able to engineer them accordingly. The technology runway provides a set of framework and re-usable patterns to enable a consistent approach to security, maintainability and reliability.

Summary of Role
We are seeking a talented Enterprise Architect (EA) who has the passion for architecting and solutioning large, multi-technology across multiple business units. The incumbent has a balanced mix of technical and business skills, who can operationalize strategy through detailing implementation. The EA is an experienced application and solution architect, an expert in application engineering in a cloud native environment.

The enterprise architect is responsible for the design and review of applications or services. The incumbent is a hands-on engineering lead who crafts and reviews applications design and architecture patterns. You will define and drive business-IT solutions that use innovative business processes, architectural and technical frameworks to provide high value solutions to complex business problems.

Why This Role Is Unique
As an Enterprise Architect at our bank, you will be at the intersection of technology innovation and regulatory compliance, ensuring that our systems are not only at the cutting edge of technology but also fully compliant with stringent regulatory standards. Your work will directly contribute to the bank’s operational excellence, resilience, and trustworthiness in the eyes of our customers and regulators alike. In this role, the EA acts as a change agent who works closely with various stakeholders including technology heads, business, business analysts, application team, infrastructure specialists, platform architects and other domain architects. EA will also advocate innovation through the exploitation of emerging technologies to drive market differentiation by forging partnership with the stakeholders and the Centre of Excellence (CoE) team.

Responsibilities

1. Organization Responsibilities: Shall perform the role of a trusted technology advisor / enterprise solution architect. Expected to drive large transformation work – existing and new. Ability to mentor and guide technical teams, fostering an environment of continuous learning and improvement. Collaborates with different engineering teams to develop and agree on system integration standards.
2. Comprehensive Domain Knowledge Application: Apply extensive domain knowledge in savings, payments, credit cards, investments, and other digital banking services to the design and architecture of banking solutions.
3. In-Depth Technical Architecture Review: Conduct thorough reviews of existing technical architectures, including software applications, infrastructure, and data management systems, ensuring they align with best practices for scalability, reliability, and security. Conduct in-depth analysis of our current systems and processes to identify opportunities for improvement and integration.
4. Architectural Strategy and Vision: Develop and refine the architectural strategy for the bank, encompassing software, infrastructure, and cloud services. This includes establishing a clear vision that supports the bank’s objectives and growth. Evolve a conceptual solution and work with the eco-system and provide directions to the independent solution streams. Stitch it together by iterating with the stakeholders and other technology architects deriving from a business need.
5. Application Engineering: Demonstrate proficiency in engineering key application technologies. Possess deep expertise in developing and maintaining robust web, middleware, and mobile applications, leveraging frameworks such as React, Angular, Spring Boot for accelerated development and enhanced scalability. Champion the adoption of industry-standard APIs to facilitate seamless integration between systems, ensuring interoperability and flexibility in the banking ecosystem. Harness the power of streaming platforms like message queue and Kafka to enable real-time data processing and analysis, empowering the bank to make data-driven decisions and deliver personalized customer experiences. Stay abreast of emerging technologies and trends in application development, continuously refining engineering practices to drive efficiency, agility, and innovation across the organization's technology landscape.
6. Establish Standard Adoption: Develop and document application of design principles, service catalogues, patterns that can be adopted as the enterprise and solution architecture standards. Drive design consistency across the bank and reduce repeated and duplication of work. Communicate and enforce Enterprise Architecture models across the bank. Ensure proper documentation of standard processes and best practices in place. Promote standards, re-usable patterns, codes, API. Drive architecture and design consistency across the bank.
7. Resilience and Disaster Recovery: Design and implement resilient system architectures that minimize downtime and data loss in the event of failures or cyber-attacks. Oversee the creation of disaster recovery plans that ensure quick recovery and continuity of operations.
8. Performance Optimization: Analyze current systems to identify bottlenecks and inefficiencies. Propose and implement solutions to enhance performance, ensuring the bank’s technology platforms can handle growing transaction volumes and user demands smoothly.
9. Scalability and Flexibility: Ensure architectures are designed to scale effectively with the bank’s growth, adapting to changing business needs and customer demands. This includes leveraging cloud technologies and modern architectural frameworks to facilitate flexibility.
10. Integration and Interoperability: Design systems that ensure seamless integration and interoperability between different banking domains, facilitating a unified customer experience that allows easy access to savings, payments, credit cards, investments, and other banking products.
11. Regulatory Compliance and Security: Design and implement technology solutions that comply with banking regulations and standards (e.g., MAS Technology Risk Management, GDPR, PCI DSS) to ensure data protection, privacy, and security.
12. Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) Alignment: Adopt SRE principles to enhance system reliability and performance. This includes defining service level objectives (SLOs) and indicators (SLIs), implementing automation for deployment and scaling, and developing resilience testing practices (e.g., chaos engineering).
13. Proactive Risk Identification and Mitigation: Employ advanced risk assessment methodologies to identify potential system vulnerabilities, failure scenarios or regulatory compliance gaps. Develop mitigation strategies to address these risks proactively, ensuring the bank remains ahead of potential threats.

Requirements

1. Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field.
2. Minimum 10 years of experience in solutioning for large complex programs with experience in banking solutions.
3. An expert in application solution design and engineering with experience across some of these common technology stack e.g. web, mobile development using Kotlin, React, Angular, API technology, message streaming, middleware etc.
4. Demonstrated expertise in reviewing and designing complex technical architectures, including detailed knowledge of software development practices, infrastructure components (e.g., servers, databases, networks), cloud computing models (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS), and modern architectural approaches (e.g., microservices, event-driven architectures).
5. Experienced working in a cloud native work environment including public cloud, containers, serverless. Familiarity and some hands-on experience with common technology – e.g., Java, Springboot, Kong API Gateway, OpenShift, AMQ, Kafka, AWS etc.
6. Ability to have conversations and present propositions to the senior management and carry the relationship along driven by content. Excellent verbal, written communication skills and executive presence.
7. Strong leadership skills, with the ability to inspire and manage cross-functional teams. Good understanding of DevOps.