Senior Principal, AI Delivery & Governance Lead

About the Role We are seeking a Senior Principal, AI Delivery & Governance Lead to drive the delivery and governance of the SMBS AI programme. SMBS is building a live AI ecosystem — agents in production, workflows redesigned, outcomes measured. This is not a strategy exercise — we are building the next generation of our operational engine. This role owns the AI backlog and solution delivery assurance — governing what gets built and when, translating use case inputs from Ops Intelligence Analysts and Delivery Excellence teams into structured backlog items, and ensuring the build team works on the highest-impact opportunities. SMBS AI does not operate in isolation. This role coordinates across the full SimCorp AI ecosystem — Product AI, Platform and Infrastructure, AI Search and Knowledge, and Compliance and Legal — aligning standards, resolving dependencies, and leveraging what is being built across SimCorp. It also shapes how SMBS transitions into this next stage, influencing the AI guidelines, governance principles, and ways of working across DMS, IOS, and IAS.

What You'll Do

• Manage the interface between the SMBS AI team and all other SimCorp AI teams, ensuring alignment on standards, dependencies, and shared roadmaps.
• Maintain the Integration Dependency Register as the single source of truth for cross-team dependencies, blockers, and agreements.
• Represent the SMBS AI team in cross-company AI governance forums and steering committees.
• Facilitate the resolution of scope boundaries and overlapping use cases with the Product AI team.
• Own the AI use case backlog, ensuring use cases are consistently structured, scored, and prioritized using the established evaluation framework.
• Receive and structure use case inputs from service unit Ops Intelligence Analysts and Delivery Excellence teams.
• Coordinate sprint planning and release sequencing with the build team.
• Manage the intake of change requests for agents in production and prioritize them against new development.
• Prepare board and executive materials related to the AI initiative, including progress reporting, investment tracking, and impact measurement.
• Manage stakeholder expectations across service units, ensuring transparency on timelines, priorities, and delivery capacity.
• Drive the compliance and legal whitelisting process for AI tools and models, ensuring tooling is approved before the build team requires it.
• Ensure the AI initiative remains anchored in the service scalability strategy and does not drift into technology-for-technology's-sake initiatives.

What We're Looking For

• 7+ years of experience in program management, operational transformation, or service delivery leadership within financial services.
• Deep understanding of investment operations across Data Management, Investment Operations, and Investment Accounting.
• Demonstrated ability to coordinate across multiple teams with competing priorities and without direct authority.
• Experience managing structured backlogs and prioritization frameworks.
• Strong stakeholder management and facilitation capabilities at senior and executive levels.
• You can hold substantive conversation with AI engineers about agent design, model selection, and deployment trade-offs and translate those conversations into decisions and priorities that non-technical stakeholders can act on.
• You are a clear and confident communicator who can represent complex AI initiatives to executive audiences.
• You thrive in ambiguous environments and bring structure and clarity where others see complexity.
• You have good English skills and are comfortable working in an international, cross-functional environment.
• You have effective collaboration skills and a bias for organizational alignment over individual delivery.
• You operate as a senior individual contributor who influences outcomes through structure, clarity, and credibility — not through hierarchy. Your value is in making the system around you work better, not in being the one who executes.

Compensation & Benefits

• Global hybrid work policy: Work 2 days a week from the office; you may work remotely on other days, or come to the office if you prefer.
• Growth and innovation: Every 6th sprint is reserved for planning and innovation, providing regular opportunities to learn new skills or improve processes.
• Self-Direction: High degree of self-organization with freedom to plan your work and contribute to initiatives beyond individual delivery.