Director, Software Engineering

Location: India (Pune / Hybrid) Type: Full-time 

Reports To: VP Engineering

This is a pivotal leadership role for someone who started their career as an engineer and has grown into an inspiring, delivery-focused leader. You will build, grow, and lead our India engineering team from the ground up — hiring great people, establishing strong engineering culture, and ensuring the India team operates as a fully integrated, high-performing part of our global engineering organisation.

You won't just manage people. You'll shape how we build software — driving engineering process, operational excellence, and technical decision-making across the organisation. If you're energised by the challenge of scaling teams, shipping great product, and raising the engineering bar, this role was made for you.

Build and scale a high-performing engineering team in India, owning the full hiring lifecycle from sourcing to onboarding.

Lead, mentor, and develop engineering managers and senior engineers, creating clear career growth pathways.

Foster a strong engineering culture rooted in ownership, collaboration, quality, and continuous improvement.

Act as a visible and trusted leader within the India organisation, representing engineering at a senior level locally.

Ensure the India team operates as a seamlessly integrated part of the global engineering organisation — not an offshore unit, but a core team with full ownership of product areas.

Partner closely with engineering leadership across other geographies to align on roadmap priorities, team structure, and ways of working.

Establish communication rhythms, collaboration practices, and tooling that bridge time zones effectively.

Champion a "one team" culture across all engineering locations.

Own and continuously improve engineering processes across the SDLC — from planning and sprint execution through to deployment and incident management.

Drive adoption of engineering best practices: code review standards, testing strategy, CI/CD pipelines, and release processes.

Define and track meaningful engineering metrics (velocity, quality, deployment frequency, lead time) and use them to drive improvement.

Lead operational readiness, on-call practices, and engineering response to production incidents.

Provide technical direction and governance, ensuring architectural decisions are sound, scalable, and aligned with the broader platform strategy.

Actively participate in and guide technical design reviews, particularly for complex or cross-cutting concerns.

Maintain hands-on credibility — able to engage meaningfully in technical discussions on C#/.NET development, Azure Cloud architecture, and Azure DevOps pipelines.

Identify and drive resolution of technical debt that poses risk to delivery speed or system reliability.

Accountability for the India team's delivery commitments — ensuring features and platform work ship on time, at quality, and with predictability.

Partner with Product Management to translate roadmap priorities into well-structured engineering plans.

Proactively manage risks, dependencies, and blockers, escalating early and communicating with clarity.

15+ years in software engineering, with at least 5 years in engineering leadership (Engineering Manager, Senior EM, or Director level).

A strong technical foundation — you began your career as a software engineer and can engage credibly in technical discussions and decisions.

Hands-on background in C# and .NET development; you don't need to be writing production code daily, but you know it deeply.

Solid understanding of Microsoft Azure cloud services and Azure DevOps for CI/CD, pipelines, and engineering workflow.

Proven experience with SQL Server as a backend data platform, including schema design, query optimisation, and production operations.

Demonstrated ability to integrate Agentic AI into production systems (e.g. AI agents embedded in product features or operational pipelines).

Proven experience building and scaling engineering teams, ideally in a high-growth SaaS environment.

Experience leading distributed or globally integrated engineering teams, with a track record of making cross-timezone collaboration work well.

Strong command of agile delivery practices and modern software engineering processes.

Exceptional communication and stakeholder management skills — equally comfortable presenting to a CTO or coaching a junior engineer.

Experience establishing a new engineering hub or centre of excellence from scratch.

Familiarity with platform/product engineering in a B2B SaaS context.

Exposure to data engineering, integrations, or API-first product development.

Experience with engineering hiring at scale in the India market.

Knowledge of compliance and security practices relevant to SaaS (SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR).

Salary Range: ₹50,00,000 to ₹70,00,000 plus 20% bonus