Director of Software Engineering

We're Hiring | Director of Software Engineering – AI-First Products & Platforms

We are hiring on behalf of one of our clients, a leading Cloud SaaS software company, for a senior engineering leadership role based in India.

We are looking for an experienced engineering leader with a strong background in enterprise software products, cloud-native platforms, SaaS modernization, and AI-first engineering practices.

If you have 15+ years of software engineering experience and a proven track record of building high-performing engineering organizations and leading large-scale technology transformations, we would love to connect.

JD-

This role combines product ownership, organizational leadership, and engineering excellence.

What You Will Be Accountable For

• Lead engineering organizations responsible for strategic products, platforms, and customer outcomes through engineering managers and senior technical leaders.
• Grow India's role as a strategic engineering center with ownership of critical product and platform investments.
• Hire, develop, and retain engineering managers, architects, principal engineers, and future leaders while building a strong succession pipeline.
• Establish a high-performance culture grounded in ownership, accountability, technical excellence, innovation, and continuous improvement.
• Build operating mechanisms that improve delivery predictability, product quality, engineering effectiveness, and organizational agility.
• Partner with Product, Architecture, Design, Data, and Business leaders to translate strategy into delivered customer and business outcomes.
• Drive modernization initiatives that improve scalability, reliability, maintainability, time-to-market, and long-term platform health.
• Lead the organization's AI-first transformation, ensuring teams successfully deliver both differentiated AI-powered products and measurable improvements in engineering effectiveness.
• Improve decision quality, prioritization, and execution discipline across teams.
• Serve as a trusted advisor to senior leadership on engineering strategy, organizational capability, technology investments, and growth opportunities.

What Success Looks Like

• Teams consistently deliver complex initiatives with quality, predictability, and speed.
• Product and platform investments produce measurable customer and business outcomes.
• Leadership bench strength grows through effective hiring, coaching, and succession planning.
• Engineering teams successfully adopt AI-first ways of building and operating software.
• Modernization investments improve reliability, scalability, developer productivity, and customer experience.
• India becomes an increasingly influential contributor to product direction, platform strategy, and engineering practices across the company.
• Teams operate with strong accountability, clear ownership, and a relentless focus on outcomes.

What You Bring

• Proven experience leading managers and senior technical leaders responsible for enterprise-scale software products, platforms, or mission-critical systems.
• Experience building high-performing organizations and developing engineering leaders at multiple levels.
• Strong technical foundation with the ability to guide architecture, platform strategy, modernization efforts, and technology investment decisions.
• Experience leading organizations through meaningful growth, transformation, or technology evolution.
• Practical experience delivering AI-enabled products and driving AI-first engineering practices with measurable outcomes.
• Strong business and product orientation with the ability to connect engineering investments to customer value and company goals.
• Executive-level communication, influence, and stakeholder management skills.
• Experience operating across globally distributed teams and cross-functional organizations.
• A track record of building culture, raising standards, and delivering sustained organizational performance.
• Led 60–150 engineers through a monolith-to-SaaS migration in a high-trust domain (tax, payments, banking, ERP) with hands- on credibility in cloud
• Bachelor's/master's degree in engineering, Computer Science or equivalent experience.
• 15+ years of software engineering experience
• Java/Spring Boot or C#/.NET services, Python for AI, Docker and Kubernetes on AWS, DevOps, Terraform, SQL/NoSQL and Snowflake
• Strong proficiency in one or more system-level languages – .Net / C# / Java etc
• Deep understanding of object-oriented programming, architectural design patterns, system design, and data structures & algorithms.
• Strong grasp of multithreading, asynchronous programming, synchronization, and cloud-native programming models.