Location - Bengaluru, India
Scope - 400–600 engineers across multiple delivery towers, leading through directors and delivery leads
Engagement - Multi-year core platform program for a Fortune 50 hi-tech client
The Role
Ascendion is looking for an engineering leader to own the build of the core platforms behind a Fortune 50 hi-tech client's product line, the software that ships inside and alongside the products their customers buy.
This is a builder's job, not a rollout job. You will run a 400–600 person engineering organization across software engineering, quality engineering, data platform, and firmware-adjacent delivery, and you will be accountable for what that organization ships: architecture, code quality, release predictability, and production stability. The client measures you on working software in their products, not on program artifacts.
You will do it in an AI-native delivery model. Ascendion builds with agentic AI and AI-assisted engineering embedded in the SDLC, and this role owns the hard part of that making it produce measurable throughput and quality gains across hundreds of engineers, in the client's own toolchain, under the client's own engineering standards. The interesting problem here is not whether AI can write code. It is what an engineering organization looks like when it does.
What You'll Own
- The engineering organization. End-to-end accountability for 400–600 engineers across multiple delivery towers structure, leadership bench, capability, and performance. You will lead through directors and delivery leads, not individual contributors.
- Technical outcomes. Architecture decisions, engineering standards, code quality, test strategy, release readiness and production stability across the platforms in scope. You own the technical bar, and you defend it.
- Delivery predictability. Sprint-level commitment reliability, release cadence, defect and escape rates, and time-to-productivity for new engineers. The client runs a metrics-driven governance model and these numbers are visible weekly.
- The AI-native operating model. Embedding agentic and AI-assisted engineering into the SDLC in the client's toolchain and proving the productivity, cycle-time and quality impact with data the client will accept.
- Client engineering relationships. You are the engineering counterpart to the client's own engineering leadership. Trusted on technical judgement, credible when you push back, and the person they call when something is on fire.
- Talent and ramp. Hiring, onboarding and time-to-productivity at scale, in a market where the quality of the first sixty days determines whether the program grows.
- Commercial awareness. Scope, capacity, change control and margin. You will not carry the P&L alone, but you will be in every conversation that moves it.
What You'll Bring
- 18+ years in software engineering, with at least 3 leading large distributed engineering organizations 300 engineers and above.
- A track record of shipping product software at scale. Platforms, embedded or device-adjacent software, cloud services, or data platforms that real customers depend on. Enterprise IT and ERP delivery alone is not the profile we are looking for.
- Technical depth you can still stand behind. You do not need to write production code, but you should be able to hold an architecture review, read a design, and tell the difference between a good answer and a confident one.
- Demonstrated results with AI-assisted or agentic software engineering at team scale or beyond with evidence, not enthusiasm.
- Experience owning a major client relationship in a services or captive model, including the difficult conversations about performance, scope and cost.
- Global delivery experience across India and US time zones, and the judgement to run a distributed organization without over-correcting into process.
- Comfort operating under demanding client governance weekly reporting, defined SLAs and KPIs, and real consequences for missing them.
What Sets The Strongest Candidates Apart
- You have taken over an engineering organization that was underperforming and turned the numbers around and you can explain exactly what you changed.
- You have engineering leadership experience inside a product company, not only a services one. You know what the client's side of the table feels like.
- You have scaled an organization through a step change in headcount without letting quality slip.
- You have a view on where AI-native engineering actually breaks down at scale, and you have been close enough to the problem to have earned it.
Why This Role
Most engineering leadership roles at this scale are stewardship. This one is not. The client is rebuilding how its core platforms get engineered, the program is multi-year and expanding, and the operating model is genuinely unsettled which means the person in this seat gets to define it rather than inherit it.
You will have the scale to matter, a client that engages at a technical level, and the room to build an engineering organization the way you think it should be built.
