Senior Software Engineer (AI Guardrail)

Some careers have more impact than others.

If youre looking for a career where you can make a real impression join HSBC and discover how valued youll be.

We are currently seeking an experienced professional to join our team in the role of Senior Software Engineer (AI Guardrail) .

Business: CTO Platforms

Job ID: 46945

Principal responsibilities

• Build and maintain runtime/data plane services for synchronous and asynchronous guardrail execution including retries/timeouts/cancellation backpressure rate limiting and overload protection.
• Develop control plane capabilities for policy/detector configuration versioning rollout/rollback and tenant onboarding exposed via internal platform APIs (REST and/or gRPC).
• Implement and integrate detectors: rule-based checks LLM-based detection (e.g. LLM-as-judge) and thirdparty detection APIs using consistent interfaces and configuration-driven orchestration.
• Deliver streaming/event-driven processing for guardrail workflows using WebSocket/SSE/gRPC streaming and/or messaging systems (e.g. Kafka/PubSub).
• Instrument end-to-end observability (metrics/logs/traces) and contribute to dashboards/alerts for latency throughput queue health detector performance and policy enforcement outcomes (e.g. OpenTelemetry/OpenInference).
• Troubleshoot and optimise production performance and reliability: profiling bottleneck analysis incident triage root-cause analysis and continuous hardening aligned to SLOs.

Requirements

• Core Backend Engineering: 3 years of professional experience building and operating distributed cloud-native backend systems. Strong hands-on skills in Python (asyncio/FastAPI) and/or Go/Java with a solid understanding of non-blocking I/O and concurrency.
• Cloud-Native & DevOps: Proficient with containerization (Docker Kubernetes) and CI/CD practices on at least one major cloud platform (GCP AWS Azure) with a strong mindset for reliability and security.
• Advanced System Architecture: Practical experience with modern architectural patterns including control plane/data plane designs streaming/event-driven systems (e.g. Kafka gRPC) and hands-on experience with observability and distributed tracing (e.g. OpenTelemetry).
• AI-Specific Integration: Experience with detector engineering including at least two of the following: LLM-based classification third-party detection API integration rule engines or lightweight ML model integration.
• Database & Data Modeling: Solid experience with both relational (e.g. PostgreSQL) and NoSQL databases plus experience with data modeling and query optimization in OLAP databases like BigQuery.
• AI-Native Mindset & Ownership: Demonstrates strong end-to-end ownership and an AI-native approach leveraging AI tools (e.g. coding assistants) to drive execution improve productivity and enhance code quality.

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Youll achieve more when you join HSBC.

HSBC is an equal opportunity employer committed to building a culture where all employees are valued respected and opinions count. We take pride in providing a workplace that fosters continuous professional development flexible working and opportunities to grow within an inclusive and diverse environment. We encourage applications from all suitably qualified persons irrespective of but not limited to their gender or genetic information sexual orientation ethnicity religion social status medical care leave requirements political affiliation people with disabilities color national origin veteran status etc. We consider all applications based on merit and suitability to the role.

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***Issued By HSBC Software Development (GuangDong) Limited***