Senior Manager, Innovation Excellence
AIA Group · Shanghai
At AIA we’ve started an exciting movement to create a healthier, more sustainable future for everyone.
As pioneering innovators for over 100 years, we’re now transforming our organisation to be faster, simpler and more connected. Because we want to be even better equipped to develop digital solutions and experiences that help more people live Healthier, Longer, Better Lives.
To get there, we need people with tech/digital/analytics expertise and passion to help develop positive, sustainable change through digitally enhanced experiences that will impact the lives of millions of people and create a healthier future for everyone.
If you believe in developing a better tomorrow, read on.
About the Role
• Drive Engineering Excellence & Innovation across the Group Innovation Office.• Set standards and strengthen review and software development governance practices [PT1.1]to improve delivery quality and consistency.
• Partner with project teams to improve solution design, product quality, and delivery effectiveness.
• Work closely with GTO and Group Risk to shape practical governance and SDLC improvements for the AI era.
Roles and Responsibilities
Innovation Excellence and Standards
- Establish and continuously improve standards of practice, engineering guidelines, review criteria, and quality expectations across GIO innovation initiatives.
- Define practical frameworks, templates, and playbooks that improve delivery consistency, solution quality, maintainability, and reuse across project teams.
- Lead continuous improvement initiatives by identifying recurring issues, synthesizing lessons learned, and translating them into actionable engineering and governance enhancements.
- Promote a disciplined innovation culture focused on quality, measurable outcomes, delivery excellence, and responsible adoption of new technologies.
Solution and Architecture Advisory
- Advise GIO project teams on solution design and architecture at project kick-off, helping teams align with agreed principles, delivery standards, and business objectives from the outset.
- Provide practical guidance on architecture options, technology choices, delivery trade-offs, and implementation considerations for AI-enabled and digital solutions.
- Support project teams in addressing design risks early, improving solution quality, reducing avoidable rework, and increasing delivery confidence.
Technical Review and Delivery Quality Governance
- Convene and support the mobile technical review committee and related governance forums to review solution proposals, assess readiness, and support quality delivery.
- Review completed solutions and contribute to sign-off on delivery quality and outcomes against defined technical, operational, and business expectations.
- Document review findings, risks, recommendations, and remediation actions, and track closure to ensure review outcomes are implemented effectively.
- Help ensure solutions are reviewed against architecture quality, scalability, security, maintainability, user experience, and reuse considerations.
Quality Evaluation, Benchmarking, and Executive Reporting
- Develop evaluation frameworks that enable project teams to assess, measure, and track product quality throughout delivery and post-release improvement cycles.
- Define relevant quality indicators, scorecards, and reporting mechanisms to benchmark products against internal expectations and external market practices.
- Prepare concise progress updates and insights for executives, highlighting quality trends, improvement priorities, benchmark results, and delivery effectiveness.
SDLC and Governance Optimization for the AI Era
- Partner with GTO and Group Risk to optimize SDLC and governance processes for AI-enabled delivery, balancing speed, control, auditability, and responsible innovation.
- Identify process simplification and automation opportunities that reduce time and effort as a percentage of project cost while preserving risk, security, and compliance requirements.
- Support the evolution of governance controls, review checkpoints, and delivery practices to better fit emerging AI use cases, experimentation patterns, and production scaling needs.
Preferred Job Requirements
- Degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or a related discipline.
- Strong experience in software engineering, solution architecture, platform delivery, cloud applications, APIs, data integration, mobile solutions, or AI-enabled products.
- Proven experience establishing engineering standards, review practices, quality controls, or delivery governance across multiple teams or products.
- Demonstrated ability to advise project teams on solution and architecture design, especially at early delivery stages, and to influence outcomes through practical technical guidance.
- Experience supporting technical review committees, architecture governance forums, or structured sign-off processes in enterprise environments.
- Good understanding of SDLC, testing, code quality controls, release governance, operational readiness, and risk-based delivery processes, including adaptation for AI-enabled solutions.
- Experience designing evaluation frameworks, scorecards, KPIs, or benchmark approaches to assess product quality, delivery maturity, or engineering effectiveness.
- Practical knowledge of CI/CD, automation practices, source control, testing frameworks, and delivery tooling, with the ability to identify efficiency improvements without compromising governance.
- Exposure to GenAI, LLM-based applications, agentic workflows, or emerging technology delivery is highly beneficial.
- Strong analytical and problem-solving capability with the ability to balance innovation speed, quality, governance, and long-term maintainability.
- Effective stakeholder management and communication skills across engineering, architecture, product, security, risk, and executive audiences.
- Experience working in regulated, regional, or large-scale enterprise environments is preferred.
- Strong written and spoken English; ability to work in multilingual regional teams is beneficial.
Build a career with us as we help our customers and the community live Healthier, Longer, Better Lives.
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