Lead - Digital Platforms & Consumer Technology/Senior Lead - Digital Platforms & Consumer Technology

Location Name: Pune Corporate Office - Mantri

Job Purpose

Bajaj Finserv Web is a critical component of the company's omnipresence strategy. You will be working with India's largest NBFC's web technology stack, encompassing over 40 business lines and 230+ features, with nearly 500 million traffic and managing over 30,000 webpages.

It is an integrated platform offering a portfolio of products covering payments, cards, wallets, loans, deposits, mutual funds, and loans on lifestyle products, ranging from consumer durables to home furnishings.

The Technical Architect – Frontend will own the architecture of the experience layer of this platform, defining and evolving a Next.js / React based rendering, performance and design system strategy across web and in-app surfaces. The role will lead the modernisation of the existing frontend into a modern, composable, component-driven architecture, working with multiple POD teams to deliver measurable gains in Core Web Vitals, SEO/GEO visibility, conversion and developer velocity. Experience with AEM or any other CMS/DXP is preferred, as content platforms remain a key source system for the experience layer.

Duties And Responsibilities

•  Analyse data such as drop-offs, bounce rate and funnel telemetry to constantly evaluate and improve journeys, and partner with Marketing, Data and Design teams on personalisation and experimentation
•  Partner with Engineering teams across BFL to create an optimal developer experience, from IDE tooling, linting and CI/CD through to preview environments and cloud native service on-boarding frameworks
•  Foster a culture of innovation and engineering excellence across the enterprise: modern engineering practices, adoption of open source and open standards, responsible use of AI assisted development, and a culture of collaboration and efficiency
•  Leadership and Team development
•  Add strategic value to processes through competition mapping and best practices adoption
•  Scout the technology landscape to ensure adoption of emerging solutions and maintain innovative edge
•  Participate in project presentations with project priorities, timelines, quarterly plans, etc. to Vertical Head for sign-off
•  Inspire and influence others to think differently, solve problems, and seize opportunities
•  Work with cross-functional teams to set and achieve targets for cross-selling
•  Determine individual training needs & development plans to build expertise and enhance skills
•  Set objectives, conduct reviews, and close appraisal processes for the team as per timelines
•  Ensure high employee engagement and morale through right management interventions while ensuring a deep emotional intelligence in approach
•  Establish performance expectations and regularly review individual performance of the team
•  Identify and create development opportunities for team members to enhance technical knowledge
•  Work towards customer business outcomes, ensuring there is a strong connection between delivery activities and business objectives
•  PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE AND QUALIFICATION
•  09-12 years of experience in building and leading large scale, high traffic frontend engineering deliveries, preferably in a Fintech, BFSI or Ecommerce company
•  Deep hands-on expertise in React JS and Next.js with TypeScript is the primary requirement for this role – including App Router, React Server Components, SSR/SSG/ISR and streaming
•  Must have led teams in tune of 25+ people across multiple domains and skills
•  Strong hands-on experience with Node JS, modern build tooling, monorepo management and design system engineering
•  Demonstrable track record of improving Core Web Vitals and page performance on a large content and transactional estate|
•  Hands-on experience with CDN and edge platforms (Akamai, Cloudflare), caching strategy and edge compute
•  Experience with Adobe Experience Manager or any other CMS/DXP (Sanity, Contentful, Strapi, Sitecore, Drupal) in a headless or hybrid model is preferred
•  Hands-on experience with building and managing release systems, code merging and promotion, and CI/CD workflows and tools
•  Relevant experience with Agile and Scaled Agile frameworks, DevSecOps methodologies & continuous improvement mindset
•  A solid understanding of eCommerce and Digital Marketing landscape, MarTech and analytics tooling, with a sufficiently strong level of business acumen of the domain
•  Understanding of security, risk, and compliance management processes in the context of IT solutions delivery, preferably in a regulated environment
•  Must be able to lead, mentor and guide a team of developers and architects|1. Frontend Architecture and Roadmap
•  Own the end-to-end frontend architecture for the customer facing web estate – rendering strategy (SSR, SSG, ISR, streaming and React Server Components), routing, caching, state management and data fetching patterns built on Next.js and React JS
•  Lead, define, maintain and own the frontend technology roadmap covering Next.js, React JS, TypeScript, Node JS, build tooling, monorepo strategy and package governance, ensuring the roadmap accounts for new and yet-to-release capabilities of the core frameworks
•  Establish and govern the enterprise Design System and shared component library – design tokens, theming, Storybook, versioning and semantic release – so that engineers across multiple PODs ship consistently and at speed
•  Set, publish and enforce performance budgets and Core Web Vitals targets (LCP, INP, CLS) across the estate, covering bundle size governance, image and font strategy, hydration and code-splitting decisions, and optimisation for low-bandwidth and low-end devices
•  Define the edge and caching architecture in partnership with CDN providers (Akamai, Cloudflare) – edge rendering, edge functions/workers, cache key design, purge strategy, personalisation at the edge and origin protection
•  Architect the integration of the frontend with headless content sources (AEM or other CMS/DXP platforms), commerce systems and backend services through a well defined BFF / GraphQL / REST contract layer
•  Own SEO, GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation), structured data, render parity and accessibility (WCAG 2.2 AA) as first class architectural concerns rather than post-release corrections
•  Define the frontend security architecture including CSP, XSS/CSRF protection, secure token and session handling in the browser, third party script governance and supply chain risk management across the dependency tree
•  Establish frontend observability and quality gates – real user monitoring, synthetic monitoring, error tracking, Lighthouse/CI budgets, unit, component and end-to-end automation, and progressive rollout through feature flags and experimentation
•  Execute POCs to validate frameworks, rendering approaches and migration paths, with clear benchmarking, cost and scalability evidence before adoption
•  Create a validation framework to measure and report the effectiveness of the frontend architecture across performance, component reuse, defect density and delivery velocity
•  Define and drive the migration approach from the existing CMS rendered estate to a modern composable frontend, ensuring zero regression on SEO, analytics, and compliance sensitive journeys
•  Ensure that throughout the year including peak sales season, digital assets continue to perform at their best by designing for auto-scale, graceful degradation, resilient rendering and correct data flow across the Node/SSR tier, CDN and origin
  
  

Key Decisions / Dimensions


Following Decisions Are Taken By The Role

•  Frontend framework, rendering and hosting strategy – Next.js rendering modes, edge vs origin execution, and the roadmap for migrating existing CMS rendered pages
•  Design system, component library and coding standards to be adopted across all POD teams
•  Performance budgets, Core Web Vitals thresholds and the quality gates that block a release
•  API and content contract structure between the frontend, CMS and backend services for both Mobile and Web App
•  Caching, CDN and edge configuration decisions in partnership with infrastructure and security teams
•  Common content and component reuse across APP and Web platform to reduce repetitive tasks and steps
•  Development workflow definition to reduce major gaps and bandwidth challenges
•  Onboard and offload partner and internal resources on the basis of POD requirements for deliverables
•  Internal and external training programs for freshers and byte employees to build their career as per interest
•  Development build checklist for every deployment to maintain hygiene on PROD servers
•  Product and technology evaluation to meet the business use cases/requirements
•  All decisions towards quality delivery to release quality products
  
  

Major Challenges

•  Balancing rendering performance, SEO/GEO discoverability and rich personalisation on a very large, multi-business-line estate
•  Migrating a large legacy CMS rendered estate to a composable Next.js frontend without regression on organic traffic, analytics or regulated journeys
•  Delivering consistent experience and Core Web Vitals across low-end Android devices, low bandwidth networks, in-app webviews and desktop
•  Driving design system adoption and architectural consistency across multiple independent POD teams and partner vendors
•  Systems and technologies need to be continuously evolved/changed within minimum time to manage growing business volumes
•  Constant training of byte hires and new joiners for optimum results
  
  

Required Qualifications And Experience

•  Qualifications
• Tech – Computer Science and Engineering
•  Work Experience
•  Core Requirement: Minimum 9-12 years of experience in software development with a strong focus on modern frontend engineering, particularly Next.js and React JS, along with Node JS and DevOps practices
•  Primary Technical Expertise: Expert level React JS (hooks, context, concurrent rendering, performance profiling) and Next.js (App Router, React Server Components, SSR/SSG/ISR, middleware, route handlers, caching and revalidation) with TypeScript
•  Core Frontend Skills: Strong command of HTML5, CSS3 and modern CSS architecture (Tailwind, CSS Modules, CSS-in-JS), semantic markup, responsive and adaptive design, cross-browser and in-app webview behaviour
•  AI Engineering Depth (mandatory): Must have built with AI rather than only consumed AI tools - for example LLM-based automation, agentic coding harnesses, evaluation pipelines or design-to-code workflows - and must be able to explain design choices, guardrails and measured outcomes.
•  Engineering Foundations: State management and data fetching patterns (React Query/TanStack, Zustand, Redux, SWR), form and validation architecture, Node JS, REST and GraphQL consumption, BFF patterns
•  Design System: Proven experience building and scaling a design system and shared component library with tokens, theming, Storybook, versioning and semantic release across multiple teams
•  Performance: Deep expertise in Core Web Vitals (LCP, INP, CLS), bundle analysis and code splitting, image and font optimisation, hydration cost reduction, streaming and partial prerendering, performance budgets in CI
•  Edge and Delivery: Hands-on with CDN and edge platforms (Akamai, Cloudflare), caching and purge strategy, edge functions/workers, and hosting models such as Vercel, OpenNext, containerised Node or serverless