Clifford Lee

I am a senior engineering leader at Amazon Web Services based in Vancouver.

Prior to Amazon, I worked at HSBC for the last 17 years. My last role was Chief Information Officer for HSBC’s Wealth and Personal Banking.

I led an organization of 350 people based in Canada with 10 direct reports. I have one director in each department: Branch and Call Centre, Mortgages, Cards, Digital, Wealth, Programme Management, CTO/Architecture, Core Banking.

I started at HSBC 17 years ago as a developer and had the opportunity to work in over 10 countries to design and deploy the products I’ve built from Vietnam, UAE, France, UK and Brazil

As Chief Information Officer, I’m accountable for new platform and feature development, IT service ownership, production support, relationship management with over 30 vendors. My IT portfolio budget oversight is on average $200m a year.

I am instrumental in launching the very first robo advisor platform which won the digital banker award for best robo advisor journey in 2021. I led the release of a new stock trading platform and a global money/wallet platform.
My role is to support the people in my organization in aligning the engineering strategy to the overall company's mission bringing together the people, ideas and capital that nurture progress and growth, helping to create a better world – for our customers, our people, our investors, our communities and the planet we all share.

I began my career working in a startup where I wore multiple hats including marketing and sales. My start up ended up installing our transport logistic software in all 90% of US' supermarket’s distribution centre.

My educational background is in both includes a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering and a masters degree in computer science, majored in software engineering where I studied at Oxford University.