Director Of Platform Engineering
FundsIndia · Engineering
Location: RMZ, ECO world, Bellandur, Bengaluru (Bangalore)
Reports to: Chief Technology Officer
Org scope: 15–20 engineers, including team leads
Function: Data, DevOps/Infrastructure, Security, Quality Engineering
About the role
FundsIndia is one of India's largest wealth advisory and financial-product distribution platforms, serving mass-affluent, IFA-partner, and HNI/UHNI clients across mutual funds, equity, PMS, AIF, bonds and more. Our engineering and product organization is structured around business-aligned stream teams supported by shared platform teams.
We're hiring a leader to own Platform Engineering — the shared foundation every product team builds on. You'll own Data, DevOps/Infrastructure, Security, and Quality Engineering, and you'll be the person the engineering organization looks to for technical judgment on how we build, ship, secure, and scale.
This is a player-coach role. You will manage and grow team leads across four specialized domains — but you are expected to earn the technical respect of strong engineers, not just coordinate them. You should be able to sit in any design review across these domains, ask the question everyone else missed, and improve the outcome.
What you'll own
- Data — data platform and lakehouse, data engineering pipelines, BI/analytics enablement, and the foundations for data science / ML.
- DevOps & Infrastructure — cloud infrastructure, networking, CI/CD, deployment safety, SRE/reliability, observability, and platform cost.
- Security — application security, DevSecOps, security operations, and engineering security policy/standards. You own the security measures and manage the relationship with our external CERT-In-empanelled audit firm, and you will hold the CISO function (or designate and empower a senior owner for it), accountable for our posture under SEBI's Cyber Security and Cyber Resilience Framework (CSCRF).
- Quality Engineering — test automation strategy, release engineering, smoke/regression/performance testing, and the quality bar across stream teams.
What you'll do
- Set the technical vision and 12–18 month roadmap for the platform, and translate it into a credible quarter-by-quarter plan.
- Treat platform as a product: define how stream teams consume your services, and build for their leverage rather than your ticket queue.
- Establish how platform demand from three business verticals is intake'd, prioritized, and arbitrated — so the platform enables velocity rather than becoming a bottleneck.
- Raise the reliability, security, and quality bar across the engineering org through standards, paved paths, and automation — not gatekeeping.
- Own the engineering side of regulatory cyber compliance (SEBI CSCRF): security controls, VAPT/audit readiness, incident response, and the working relationship with the external empanelled auditor.
- Hire, grow, and retain strong team leads and engineers; build a bench so the function does not depend on any single person, including you.
- Be hands-on where it matters: design reviews, architecture decisions, incident response, and the occasional prototype.
- Partner with product, the business-vertical engineering leads, compliance/risk, and executive leadership.
Who you are
Technical credibility (non-negotiable)
- Demonstrable hands-on depth in at least one or two of these domains — most likely infrastructure/platform/DevOps — earned as a Staff/Principal engineer, architect, or a leader who stayed technical.
- Sharp enough across the remaining domains to challenge decisions, evaluate trade-offs, and tell good work from hand-waving — without needing to be the deepest expert in each.
- Strong systems and architecture judgment at scale: reliability, deployment safety, data architecture, and security-by-design.
Leadership
- Experience managing managers/leads and a team in the 15+ range, with a track record of hiring well and growing people.
- Secure enough to hire specialists deeper than you (especially in security and data science) and let them lead.
- Able to drive prioritization and alignment across competing business demands.
Context
- 12+ years in engineering with several in leadership; experience in a regulated environment (fintech / financial services / wealth / payments) is a strong plus.
- Working familiarity with regulatory cyber obligations (SEBI CSCRF or equivalent such as RBI/IRDAI frameworks, ISO 27001, SOC 2) and comfort owning or sponsoring the CISO function.
- Comfortable in a fast-moving, multi-business-line product organization.
What success looks like in the first year
- A clear, shared platform roadmap and a working intake/prioritization model that the business verticals trust.
- Measurable improvement in deployment reliability and release safety, and a credible security posture appropriate to a regulated wealth platform.
- A capable, well-led team with strong leads in each domain and reduced key-person risk.
- Engineering across the org reports that the platform makes them faster and safer to ship.
- Cost optimizations on Infra
Nice to have
- Background bridging from deep IC into leadership (Staff/Principal → management).
- Experience standing up or maturing a platform-as-a-product function.
- Direct experience with SEBI CSCRF (or comparable financial-sector cyber frameworks), VAPT/audit cycles, and holding or sponsoring a CISO mandate.
