10th October 2025, Kathmandu
The detailed analysis of the career opportunities recently announced by NMB Bank Limited, one of Nepal’s leading commercial banks and the recipient of the prestigious Bank of the Year – Asia 2021 award.
NMB Bank Announces Vacancy
The three key positions, Manager-IT Operations, AI & ML Engineer, and Cybersecurity Engineer, highlight the bank’s strategic focus on digital transformation, operational resilience, and innovative financial services in the Nepalese market.
The recruitment drive underscores a broader trend in the South Asian financial sector where technology, data security, and compliance have become central to achieving business goals and maintaining a competitive edge. This expansion into advanced technology roles reflects the bank’s commitment to its stated pillars: sustainable banking, digital transformation, and high corporate governance standards.
1. Manager – IT Operations (Deputy Manager/Manager Level)
This role is a critical leadership position, responsible for ensuring the seamless, secure, and compliant functioning of all technological backbone systems, which is the cornerstone of modern banking.
Key Focus Areas and Contextual Significance
- System Uptime and Scalability: The core responsibility is to “Ensure high system availability, scalability, and disaster recovery preparedness.” In a commercial bank, this directly refers to the Core Banking System (CBS) and its peripherals, which handle all customer and financial data. Given the increasing adoption of digital payments in Nepal, as noted by the Nepal Rastra Bank (NRB), ensuring 24/7/365 uptime and the ability to scale to meet high transaction volumes (e.g., mobile banking, QR payments) is paramount.
- Core Management and Project Leadership: The manager must manage the implementation and maintenance of key systems, which includes negotiating vendor contracts, managing service level agreements (SLAs), and leading teams. The preference for PMP or ITIL certifications emphasizes the need for structured project management and service delivery excellence in line with international standards.
- Compliance Integration: A significant part of the role is to “Enforce information security and compliance with standards such as ISO 27001 and PCI DSS.” This connects IT operations directly to regulatory and security requirements, which are non-negotiable for a leading financial institution. The IT Operations Manager is the bridge between system performance and regulatory adherence.
Required Skills and Experience
The requirement of 7–10 years of IT experience in the banking or financial sector and certifications like CISM or CISSP (often associated with security management, which is a key responsibility) indicates a search for a seasoned leader who can manage not just technical staff but also strategic direction, budget, and cross-departmental alignment. The role is a high-level blend of technical knowledge and strategic business management.
2. AI & ML Engineer (Junior Officer/Officer/Senior Officer Level)
This position is a clear indication of NMB Bank’s shift towards becoming a data-driven institution, moving beyond basic digitalization into advanced, intelligence-led services. This aligns with the bank’s history of being a digital innovator in the Nepalese market.
Key Focus Areas and Contextual Significance
- Pioneering Digital Solutions: The bank has historically demonstrated AI/ML adoption, notably launching “NMB Sapati”, an AI-driven, fully automated loan product accessible 24/7 via mobile, which was a first of its kind in Nepal (Source 2.4). The new engineer will be expected to build upon this foundation.
- Core Banking Applications of AI: The responsibilities listed—fraud detection, credit scoring, transaction risk management, and customer personalization—represent the high-value use cases for AI in financial services globally.
- Fraud Detection and Risk Management: This is crucial for securing the bank’s digital platforms against growing cyber threats.
- Credit Scoring: Automated, data-driven credit scoring is fundamental to providing instant, paperless loans like NMB Sapati, improving both efficiency and customer experience.
- Technical Stack: The requirement for proficiency in Python, R, SQL, and big data platforms underscores the need for expertise in the industry-standard toolkit for data science and model deployment, which is a key technical challenge in emerging markets. The mention of MLOps highlights the focus on deploying and maintaining models in a production environment.
- NLP and Service Automation: Implementing Natural Language Processing (NLP) for service automation and sentiment analysis suggests a move toward AI-powered chatbots, virtual assistants, or sophisticated customer feedback analysis to further enhance their digital services (Source 2.1).
3. Cybersecurity Engineer (Junior Officer/Officer/Senior Officer Level)
The creation of a dedicated Cybersecurity Engineer role emphasizes the critical nature of information security, moving it from a general IT function to a specialized, proactive defense capability.
Key Focus Areas and Compliance Imperatives
- Defense-in-Depth: The responsibilities cover a comprehensive security architecture, including firewalls, SIEM (Security Information and Event Management), IDS/IPS (Intrusion Detection/Prevention Systems), and endpoint protection. This indicates a multi-layered, “defense-in-depth” strategy to protect the bank’s expanding digital footprint.
- Proactive Security Testing: The requirement to “Conduct vulnerability assessments, penetration testing, and incident response” signals a shift toward a proactive security posture, continuously looking for and remediating vulnerabilities before they can be exploited. This is essential given the complexity of securing modern banking applications, APIs, and digital systems.
- Regulatory Compliance: The explicit mention of compliance with PCI DSS, ISO 27001, GDPR, and PSD2 is highly significant:
- PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard): Mandatory for any institution processing, storing, or transmitting credit card data, which is essential for NMB Bank’s payment gateway services.
- ISO 27001: An international standard for Information Security Management Systems (ISMS), which provides a systematic approach to managing sensitive information security risks. Its enforcement ensures a robust, organization-wide security policy.
- GDPR and PSD2: While primarily European regulations, their inclusion suggests that NMB Bank is adhering to global best practices in data protection and open banking security, positioning itself as an internationally compliant financial institution, consistent with the reputation earned from the Bank of the Year – Asia 2021 award.
Required Skills and Expertise
The need for hands-on experience with VAPT (Vulnerability Assessment and Penetration Testing) tools, threat modeling, and SIEM tools confirms that the bank is seeking technical experts who can execute and manage sophisticated security operations, rather than just policy writers. Expertise in cloud security is also vital as banks increasingly move services to the cloud.
The Bank’s Strategic Context
The timing and nature of these vacancies are perfectly aligned with NMB Bank’s strategic identity as an award-winning institution that prioritizes sustainable banking and digital transformation (Source 4.2, 4.3).
The recruitment of these high-level technology professionals demonstrates that the bank sees technology not just as a support function but as a core strategic pillar for:
- Operational Excellence: The IT Operations Manager ensures stability and compliance.
- Customer Innovation: The AI/ML Engineer creates new, faster, and more personalized digital products.
- Trust and Resilience: The Cybersecurity Engineer safeguards the entire ecosystem, protecting customer trust, a vital asset for any bank aiming for stability and long-term success.
This move solidifies NMB Bank’s leadership position in leveraging advanced technology to drive growth and achieve its ambitious goal of becoming the most sustainable bank in the country by 2025
For More: NMB Bank Announces Vacancy