State Bank of India has created the post of Chief AI Officer for the first time, at General Manager rank, and is advertising it along with five other artificial-intelligence roles under advertisement number CRPD/SCO/2026-27/30. The annual CTC for the Chief AI Officer post has an upper range of ₹160.00 lakh — roughly ₹1.6 crore.
Online registration and fee payment run from 19 October 2026 to 9 November 2026, a window of 22 days. That leaves 17 days from today. Applications are accepted only through sbi.bank.in/web/careers/current-openings.
All six posts, vacancies, age and pay
| Post | Vacancies | Age (as on 30.09.2026) | Annual CTC — upper range | Minimum experience |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| GM & Chief AI Officer | 1 (UR) | 40–55 years | ₹160.00 lakh | 15+ years, of which 3+ in a senior leadership role |
| DGM (Risk and Operational Analytics) | 1 (UR) | 35–50 years | ₹120.00 lakh | 10+ years, of which 2+ in a senior leadership role |
| DGM (AI Governance and Compliance) | 1 (UR) | 35–50 years | ₹120.00 lakh | 10+ years, of which 2+ in a senior leadership role |
| DGM (Data Engineering, Model Application Dev and AI Ops) | 1 (UR) | 35–50 years | ₹120.00 lakh | 10+ years, of which 2+ in a senior leadership role |
| AI Solution Architect | 1 (UR) | 30–45 years | ₹90.00 lakh | 8+ years, of which 3+ in a senior leadership role |
| Enterprise AI Architect | 1 (UR) | 30–45 years | ₹90.00 lakh | 8+ years, of which 3+ in a senior leadership role |
| Total | 6 | — | — | — |
Two things in that table deserve to be read twice.
First, every one of the 6 posts is unreserved. There is no SC, ST, OBC, EWS or PwBD break-up in this advertisement, because single-post cadres cannot be reserved. If you are planning around a reserved-category route, there is not one here.
Second, this is not permanent bank employment. All six are Fixed Term Employment engagements for 3 years, renewable at the Bank's discretion for a further 2 years, with the total engagement capped at 5 years. Either side can terminate on three months' notice, or by paying three months' compensation in lieu. The posting is Mumbai, or anywhere in India if the Bank requires it.
The pay is more conditional than the headline number suggests
The CTC figures above are an upper range, and the advertisement states plainly that the annual CTC is negotiable and will depend on the candidate's experience, current emoluments and place of posting. There is a formal CTC negotiation step built into the selection process.
Of whatever is finally agreed, 90 per cent is fixed pay and 10 per cent is variable — and the variable slice is released on a performance slab:
| Performance rating | Variable pay released |
|---|---|
| 99 to 100% | 100% |
| 97 to 98.99% | 90% |
| 94 to 96.99% | 80% |
| 90 to 93.99% | 70% |
| Below 90% | Nil |
In other words, a performance rating below 90 per cent pays nothing from the variable component. On the Chief AI Officer's upper range, that 10 per cent is about ₹16 lakh a year riding on the rating.
One genuine ambiguity worth knowing before you negotiate: the remuneration grid on page 13 gives the annual increment band as “Upto 5%”, while the footnote on the same page says the annual increment from the second year onwards is “upto 10% (depending on performance)”. The advertisement does not reconcile the two figures. We have rasterised the page to be certain we are reading the grid correctly, and we are — it is the document that disagrees with itself. Treat it as a question for the negotiation table rather than a settled number.
What the advertisement reveals about SBI's AI stack
Most recruitment notices are generic about technology. This one is not, and the detail is the most interesting part of the document.
- The infrastructure is NVIDIA-based. The Enterprise AI Architect's responsibilities include designing and optimising “GPU infrastructure and workload architectures, specifically leveraging the NVIDIA AI Enterprise ecosystem”, and a named KRA is ensuring the utilisation, scalability and resilience of “the Bank's NVIDIA-based AI infrastructure”. SBI is not evaluating a stack; it already has one.
- Agentic AI and LLMs are in scope, not aspiration. The same role covers Generative AI and Large Language Model solutions using Retrieval Augmented Generation and vector databases, plus “architectures for agentic AI systems, model gateways, and efficient model serving mechanisms”.
- The advertisement names MCP and the OpenAI API. Among the specific skills required of the Chief AI Officer is an understanding of “REST API integrations, MCP, OpenAI API, etc standards”. A public sector bank naming the Model Context Protocol in a recruitment notice is a reasonable signal of how current the programme is.
- The scale bar is explicit: experience “deploying systems at scale (1,00,000+ users at least)”, along with GPU acceleration of workloads, Kubernetes-based cloud-native deployment, data mesh and data fabric concepts, and MLOps / LLM Ops pipelines.
The Chief AI Officer's mandatory experience is 15+ years in banking, BFSI or IT, of which at least 3 years must be senior leadership in AI, analytics, model oversight, governance and business transformation. The advertisement closes that door carefully: “Individual contributor role experience does not count towards these three years”, and training or teaching experience is not counted for eligibility at all.
Selection: no written exam at all
There is no objective test in this recruitment. Selection is by shortlisting, followed by interview, followed by CTC negotiation.
- Shortlisting. Meeting the minimum qualification and experience gives no right to an interview. A shortlisting committee sets the parameters, and the Bank's decision on whom to call is final.
- Interview: 100 marks. For the Chief AI Officer and the three DGM posts, the interview includes a 10-minute presentation on your relevant job profile, projects undertaken or milestones achieved. The two Architect posts are interview-only.
- The merit list is built on interview marks alone. Nothing else carries forward. If two candidates tie at the cut-off, they are ranked by age in descending order — the older candidate is placed higher.
The qualifying mark in the interview is decided by the Bank and is not published.
Fee, documents and the multiple-application trap
The application fee and intimation charges are ₹750 for General, EWS and OBC candidates, and nil for SC, ST and PwBD candidates. It is non-refundable, and payment is online only — internet banking, debit card or credit card. Registration is complete only when the fee has been paid on or before the last date.
As with every SBI SCO advertisement, multiple registrations are penalised: only the last valid application is retained and the fee paid for the others is forfeited. Apply once.
Upload everything the advertisement asks for — resume, ID proof, age proof, caste or EWS certificate where applicable, PwBD certificate where applicable, educational qualifications, other certifications and proof of experience. The notice is blunt about the consequence of a gap: an application missing required documents “will not be considered for Shortlisting / Interview”.
On the experience certificate specifically, SBI wants it to state the nature of duties, the dates and duration, the level or position held, and the responsibilities. If your employer will not issue one in that form, any document that unambiguously shows the same things may be submitted, and it will be considered on merit at the Bank's discretion.
Photograph and signature follow the usual SBI specification: scanner at a minimum of 200 dpi, saved as JPEG, not exceeding 50 KB for the photograph and 20 KB for the signature.
Who should actually apply
This is lateral hiring, not an entry route. The youngest door into this advertisement is the 30-year minimum age on the two Architect posts, which also require 8 years of experience including 3 in AI or analytics solutioning. If you are preparing for SBI PO, SBI Clerk or IBPS exams, this notification is not for you — but it is worth reading as a map of where bank hiring is going, because the skills listed here are the ones that will shape specialist officer recruitment over the next few years.
The spread between the top and bottom of this advertisement is ₹70.00 lakh of annual CTC across six posts advertised on the same day, which is a fair indication of how steeply SBI is pricing seniority in this field.
Official documents
All three are mirrored on our servers.
- Detailed Advertisement CRPD/SCO/2026-27/30 — 18 pages (PDF)
- Biodata Format (PDF)
- CTC Negotiation Form (PDF)
Apply at sbi.bank.in/web/careers/current-openings. SBI publishes every change, corrigendum, result and shortlist only on that page, and sends call letters by email alone — no hard copy is issued.