Job description

JOB DESCRIPTION

Director of Engineering

Position	Director of Engineering	Department	Engineering
Reporting To	CTO	Experience	15+ Years
Location	Ahmedabad, India	Employment Type	Full-Time

1. Role Summary

The Director of Engineering will lead the engineering organization with overall accountability for engineering delivery, quality, reliability, technology evolution, operational efficiency, and leadership development.

The role will translate Product and Business priorities into predictable engineering execution and ensure that Development, QA, DevOps/SRE, Architecture, Security, and Technical Delivery operate as a coordinated and accountable engineering organization.

The Director of Engineering will establish a culture where teams deliver fast without compromising quality, build quality into the system, innovate responsibly, continuously improve engineering productivity, and operate independently with clear ownership.

2. Goal

Deliver fast without compromise, build quality into the system, innovate responsibly, and grow teams that operate independently.

3. Key Responsibilities

3.1 Engineering Delivery & Predictability

Own engineering delivery across multiple product and technology teams.
Translate Product and Business priorities into executable engineering plans and roadmaps.
Establish monthly, quarterly, and annual engineering planning processes.
Ensure engineering commitments are aligned with team capacity and business priorities.
Drive effective sprint planning, capacity management, dependency tracking, and release planning.
Monitor committed versus delivered scope and proactively address delivery risks.
Identify and remove cross-functional bottlenecks involving Product, Architecture, QA, DevOps, Security, Support, and Implementation.
Drive reduction in engineering cycle time and improve flow from development to production.
Ensure cross-team dependencies do not become a cause of release delays.
Establish engineering delivery dashboards and review mechanisms.

Expected Outcomes

≥90% planned commitment delivered per month.
≤10% variance between committed and delivered scope.
≥20% reduction in engineering lead time QoQ.
Zero release delays caused by unmanaged engineering dependencies.

3.2 Quality & Reliability

Establish quality as an engineering responsibility, not solely a QA responsibility.
Partner with QA leadership to establish quality gates throughout the SDLC.
Drive prevention of critical production defects through engineering practices, automation, code reviews, testing, and observability.
Ensure P0/P1 production issues receive appropriate engineering ownership.
Establish strong RCA and corrective/preventive action (CAPA) mechanisms.
Drive shared ownership for production reliability across Engineering, QA, and DevOps/SRE.
Ensure critical business flows have adequate automated regression coverage.
Establish release-readiness and engineering sign-off processes.
Monitor production SLA adherence and engineering contribution to support resolution.
Drive elimination of recurring production issues.

Expected Outcomes

Zero P0/P1 production bugs attributable to engineering quality gaps.
Zero avoidable production outages.
≥95% automated regression coverage for critical flows.
100% production SLA compliance.

3.3 Architecture, Scalability & Technical Debt

Provide strategic direction for the evolution of engineering architecture.
Establish and govern an Architecture Review Board / Architecture Governance process.
Ensure critical architectural decisions are reviewed, documented, and communicated.
Evaluate architectural changes for scalability, maintainability, security, performance, reliability, and operational impact.
Establish systematic identification, prioritization, and remediation of technical debt.
Ensure technical debt is incorporated into regular engineering planning and execution.
Drive performance engineering and scalability planning for critical systems.
Ensure observability and resilience are embedded into system architecture.
Promote appropriate modern engineering patterns, including:
Event-driven architecture
Distributed systems
API-first architecture
Cloud-native architecture
Kubernetes and containerization
Infrastructure as Code
Observability
Resilience engineering
Evaluate emerging technologies based on measurable engineering and business value.

Expected Outcomes

100% of critical architectural changes reviewed and documented.
Continuous reduction of critical technical debt.
No scalability-related incidents during planned peak loads.
Measurable adoption of modern engineering practices across core platforms.

3.4 DevOps, SRE, Automation & Engineering Efficiency

Partner with DevOps/SRE leadership to improve engineering productivity and platform reliability.
Enable self-service capabilities for Development and QA teams.
Eliminate unnecessary operational dependencies and manual engineering activities.
Drive CI/CD maturity across engineering teams.
Promote automated build, test, deployment, rollback, monitoring, and environment provisioning.
Ensure timely adoption and deployment of new engineering tools and technologies.
Establish and mature SRE practices, including:
SLI/SLO definition
Error budgets
Availability monitoring
Incident management
Capacity planning
Performance monitoring
Drive infrastructure and cloud cost optimization.
Ensure engineering decisions consider total cost of ownership.

Expected Outcomes

DevOps requests from Engineering/QA supported within defined response targets.
Zero deployment delays caused by tooling gaps.
≥15% infrastructure cost optimization YoY, where technically and commercially feasible.
SLOs defined for 100% of critical services.

3.5 AI Engineering & Innovation

Establish responsible adoption of AI-assisted software engineering across Development, QA, DevOps, Security, and Documentation.
Identify repetitive engineering activities suitable for AI automation.
Establish standards for AI-assisted coding, testing, code review, documentation, and engineering productivity.
Measure AI adoption through measurable productivity and quality improvements.
Ensure AI-generated code and engineering artifacts comply with security, privacy, quality, and architecture standards.
Evaluate emerging technologies through controlled PoCs before organization-wide adoption.
Encourage engineering teams to continuously identify opportunities for automation and innovation.

Expected Outcomes

Measurable engineering productivity improvement through AI.
Increased automation of repetitive engineering activities.
Responsible adoption of AI across relevant engineering functions.
No material security or quality degradation due to AI adoption.

3.6 People Leadership & Organization Development

Build a strong engineering leadership structure across Engineering, QA, DevOps/SRE, Architecture, and Technical Delivery.
Coach and mentor Engineering Managers, Technical Leads, Architects, and senior engineering leaders.
Establish clear accountability and decision-making authority across teams.
Build teams capable of operating independently with minimal management escalation.
Identify future engineering leaders and establish succession plans.
Define competency frameworks and career-development paths.
Drive continuous technical and leadership development.
Establish communities of practice and knowledge-sharing mechanisms.
Ensure engineering organization structure and capabilities scale with product and business growth.
Build a culture of ownership, accountability, transparency, collaboration, and continuous improvement.

Expected Outcomes

≥80% of leadership positions filled through internal talent development, where feasible.
Teams operate independently with minimal avoidable escalation.
At least two strategically relevant new capabilities developed/adopted per team annually.
Engineering attrition maintained below 20%.

3.7 Governance, Compliance & Risk Management

Establish engineering governance across Development, QA, DevOps, Architecture, Security, and Technical Delivery.
Define and maintain clear RACI across Product, Engineering, QA, DevOps, Security, and Operations.
Establish weekly engineering health reviews and monthly engineering performance reviews.
Ensure engineering KPIs and OKRs are transparent and measurable.
Establish engineering risk identification, tracking, and mitigation mechanisms.
Ensure compliance with applicable technology, security, privacy, and healthcare regulations.
Work closely with Security and Compliance teams on:
HIPAA
DPDP Act
ISO standards
Secure SDLC
Data protection
Access control
Audit requirements
Ensure critical engineering risks are visible to executive leadership.

Expected Outcomes

100% of engineering teams report agreed delivery, quality, and reliability metrics.
Clear RACI with minimal execution ambiguity.
Zero material compliance violations attributable to engineering governance gaps.

4. Cross-Functional Leadership

The Director of Engineering will work closely with the following stakeholders:

Stakeholder	Primary Collaboration
CTO / CEO	Technology strategy, engineering performance, organizational capability and business alignment
Product Management	Product roadmap, prioritization, requirements and delivery commitments
Technical Heads / Engineering Managers	Engineering execution, capacity, quality and team performance
Architecture	Technology strategy, architecture governance and modernization
QA	Quality engineering, automation, release readiness and defect prevention
DevOps / SRE	Platform reliability, CI/CD, observability and engineering enablement
Security	Secure SDLC, application security, risk and compliance
Technical Delivery / PMO	Delivery governance, dependencies and customer commitments
Support / Implementation	Production issues, customer escalations and operational feedback
HR	Hiring, organization design, performance management and leadership development

5. Leadership Expectations

The Director of Engineering is expected to:

Own outcomes, not just activities.
Build systems and processes that allow teams to operate independently.
Make decisions using measurable engineering and business data.
Balance speed, quality, reliability, security, and cost.
Remove organizational bottlenecks rather than becoming another approval layer.
Develop strong engineering leaders instead of becoming the escalation point for every decision.
Establish accountability without unnecessary bureaucracy.
Maintain strong technical credibility while operating at an executive level.
Promote continuous improvement across the engineering organization.
Build an engineering organization that scales with the business.

6. Required Experience

15+ years of software engineering experience with significant engineering leadership experience.
Proven experience leading multiple engineering teams or engineering functions.
Experience managing Engineering Managers, Technical Leads, Architects, or equivalent senior leaders.
Strong experience in enterprise/product software engineering.
Experience owning engineering delivery and technology roadmaps.
Strong understanding of software architecture and distributed systems.
Experience with cloud-native platforms and modern DevOps practices.
Experience managing production-critical applications.
Experience establishing engineering metrics, OKRs, KPIs, and governance.
Strong experience with Agile/Scrum and iterative product development.
Experience managing technical debt and modernization initiatives.
Experience driving engineering automation and productivity improvements.
Experience with hiring, organization design, succession planning, and leadership development.

7. Educational Qualification

Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or a related field.
Equivalent professional experience may be considered.

8. Must-Have & Good-to-Have Capabilities

#	Capability	Must Have	Good to Have
1	Engineering Leadership	15+ years engineering experience; proven leadership of multiple engineering teams/functions	Experience leading 50+ engineers or multiple product engineering organizations
2	Delivery & Predictability	Roadmap execution, capacity planning, sprint/release management, dependency management and delivery governance	Large multi-product / multi-team portfolio management
3	People & Leadership Development	Develop Engineering Managers, Tech Leads and Architects; build self-sufficient teams	Succession planning and structured leadership development programs
4	Architecture & Scalability	Strong knowledge of scalable, distributed, event-driven and cloud-native architecture	Large-scale modernization, platform transformation or migration experience
5	Quality & Reliability	Quality engineering, automation, quality gates, CI/CD, observability, SLI/SLO and incident management	Organization-wide Quality Engineering / mature SRE transformation
6	Technical Debt & Performance	Drive technical-debt reduction, modernization, performance and scalability initiatives	Experience operating high-volume, mission-critical platforms
7	Engineering Governance & Metrics	Engineering OKRs/KPIs, delivery, quality, reliability and engineering-health metrics	DORA/SPACE, Engineering Councils or Architecture Boards
8	Security & Compliance	Secure SDLC, application security, data protection and compliance awareness	HIPAA, DPDP, ISO 27001, SOC 2, HL7/FHIR or healthcare experience
9	AI, Automation & Cloud	Strong automation mindset and understanding of modern cloud/DevOps practices	AI-assisted engineering, Kubernetes, platform engineering, GitOps and FinOps
10	Business & Executive Leadership	Align Engineering with Product/Business priorities; strong cross-functional and executive communication	Technology budget ownership, CXO/Board presentations and organization-wide transformation

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Someone shared one job with you. ASAI keeps finding the rest.

Scored, not searched. Every role ranked against your actual profile.

Alerts as often as hourly. Reach new roles while the pile is still small.

Skill gaps, spelled out. See exactly which requirements you don't meet yet.

Verified jobs, only. Say no to ghost jobs. Your time deserves respect.

Job description

JOB DESCRIPTION

Director of Engineering

Position	Director of Engineering	Department	Engineering
Reporting To	CTO	Experience	15+ Years
Location	Ahmedabad, India	Employment Type	Full-Time

1. Role Summary

2. Goal

Deliver fast without compromise, build quality into the system, innovate responsibly, and grow teams that operate independently.

3. Key Responsibilities

3.1 Engineering Delivery & Predictability

Own engineering delivery across multiple product and technology teams.
Translate Product and Business priorities into executable engineering plans and roadmaps.
Establish monthly, quarterly, and annual engineering planning processes.
Ensure engineering commitments are aligned with team capacity and business priorities.
Drive effective sprint planning, capacity management, dependency tracking, and release planning.
Monitor committed versus delivered scope and proactively address delivery risks.
Identify and remove cross-functional bottlenecks involving Product, Architecture, QA, DevOps, Security, Support, and Implementation.
Drive reduction in engineering cycle time and improve flow from development to production.
Ensure cross-team dependencies do not become a cause of release delays.
Establish engineering delivery dashboards and review mechanisms.

Expected Outcomes

≥90% planned commitment delivered per month.
≤10% variance between committed and delivered scope.
≥20% reduction in engineering lead time QoQ.
Zero release delays caused by unmanaged engineering dependencies.

3.2 Quality & Reliability

Establish quality as an engineering responsibility, not solely a QA responsibility.
Partner with QA leadership to establish quality gates throughout the SDLC.
Drive prevention of critical production defects through engineering practices, automation, code reviews, testing, and observability.
Ensure P0/P1 production issues receive appropriate engineering ownership.
Establish strong RCA and corrective/preventive action (CAPA) mechanisms.
Drive shared ownership for production reliability across Engineering, QA, and DevOps/SRE.
Ensure critical business flows have adequate automated regression coverage.
Establish release-readiness and engineering sign-off processes.
Monitor production SLA adherence and engineering contribution to support resolution.
Drive elimination of recurring production issues.

Expected Outcomes

Zero P0/P1 production bugs attributable to engineering quality gaps.
Zero avoidable production outages.
≥95% automated regression coverage for critical flows.
100% production SLA compliance.

3.3 Architecture, Scalability & Technical Debt

Provide strategic direction for the evolution of engineering architecture.
Establish and govern an Architecture Review Board / Architecture Governance process.
Ensure critical architectural decisions are reviewed, documented, and communicated.
Evaluate architectural changes for scalability, maintainability, security, performance, reliability, and operational impact.
Establish systematic identification, prioritization, and remediation of technical debt.
Ensure technical debt is incorporated into regular engineering planning and execution.
Drive performance engineering and scalability planning for critical systems.
Ensure observability and resilience are embedded into system architecture.
Promote appropriate modern engineering patterns, including:
Event-driven architecture
Distributed systems
API-first architecture
Cloud-native architecture
Kubernetes and containerization
Infrastructure as Code
Observability
Resilience engineering
Evaluate emerging technologies based on measurable engineering and business value.

Expected Outcomes

100% of critical architectural changes reviewed and documented.
Continuous reduction of critical technical debt.
No scalability-related incidents during planned peak loads.
Measurable adoption of modern engineering practices across core platforms.

3.4 DevOps, SRE, Automation & Engineering Efficiency

Partner with DevOps/SRE leadership to improve engineering productivity and platform reliability.
Enable self-service capabilities for Development and QA teams.
Eliminate unnecessary operational dependencies and manual engineering activities.
Drive CI/CD maturity across engineering teams.
Promote automated build, test, deployment, rollback, monitoring, and environment provisioning.
Ensure timely adoption and deployment of new engineering tools and technologies.
Establish and mature SRE practices, including:
SLI/SLO definition
Error budgets
Availability monitoring
Incident management
Capacity planning
Performance monitoring
Drive infrastructure and cloud cost optimization.
Ensure engineering decisions consider total cost of ownership.

Expected Outcomes

DevOps requests from Engineering/QA supported within defined response targets.
Zero deployment delays caused by tooling gaps.
≥15% infrastructure cost optimization YoY, where technically and commercially feasible.
SLOs defined for 100% of critical services.

3.5 AI Engineering & Innovation

Establish responsible adoption of AI-assisted software engineering across Development, QA, DevOps, Security, and Documentation.
Identify repetitive engineering activities suitable for AI automation.
Establish standards for AI-assisted coding, testing, code review, documentation, and engineering productivity.
Measure AI adoption through measurable productivity and quality improvements.
Ensure AI-generated code and engineering artifacts comply with security, privacy, quality, and architecture standards.
Evaluate emerging technologies through controlled PoCs before organization-wide adoption.
Encourage engineering teams to continuously identify opportunities for automation and innovation.

Expected Outcomes

Measurable engineering productivity improvement through AI.
Increased automation of repetitive engineering activities.
Responsible adoption of AI across relevant engineering functions.
No material security or quality degradation due to AI adoption.

3.6 People Leadership & Organization Development

Build a strong engineering leadership structure across Engineering, QA, DevOps/SRE, Architecture, and Technical Delivery.
Coach and mentor Engineering Managers, Technical Leads, Architects, and senior engineering leaders.
Establish clear accountability and decision-making authority across teams.
Build teams capable of operating independently with minimal management escalation.
Identify future engineering leaders and establish succession plans.
Define competency frameworks and career-development paths.
Drive continuous technical and leadership development.
Establish communities of practice and knowledge-sharing mechanisms.
Ensure engineering organization structure and capabilities scale with product and business growth.
Build a culture of ownership, accountability, transparency, collaboration, and continuous improvement.

Expected Outcomes

≥80% of leadership positions filled through internal talent development, where feasible.
Teams operate independently with minimal avoidable escalation.
At least two strategically relevant new capabilities developed/adopted per team annually.
Engineering attrition maintained below 20%.

3.7 Governance, Compliance & Risk Management

Establish engineering governance across Development, QA, DevOps, Architecture, Security, and Technical Delivery.
Define and maintain clear RACI across Product, Engineering, QA, DevOps, Security, and Operations.
Establish weekly engineering health reviews and monthly engineering performance reviews.
Ensure engineering KPIs and OKRs are transparent and measurable.
Establish engineering risk identification, tracking, and mitigation mechanisms.
Ensure compliance with applicable technology, security, privacy, and healthcare regulations.
Work closely with Security and Compliance teams on:
HIPAA
DPDP Act
ISO standards
Secure SDLC
Data protection
Access control
Audit requirements
Ensure critical engineering risks are visible to executive leadership.

Expected Outcomes

100% of engineering teams report agreed delivery, quality, and reliability metrics.
Clear RACI with minimal execution ambiguity.
Zero material compliance violations attributable to engineering governance gaps.

4. Cross-Functional Leadership

The Director of Engineering will work closely with the following stakeholders:

Stakeholder	Primary Collaboration
CTO / CEO	Technology strategy, engineering performance, organizational capability and business alignment
Product Management	Product roadmap, prioritization, requirements and delivery commitments
Technical Heads / Engineering Managers	Engineering execution, capacity, quality and team performance
Architecture	Technology strategy, architecture governance and modernization
QA	Quality engineering, automation, release readiness and defect prevention
DevOps / SRE	Platform reliability, CI/CD, observability and engineering enablement
Security	Secure SDLC, application security, risk and compliance
Technical Delivery / PMO	Delivery governance, dependencies and customer commitments
Support / Implementation	Production issues, customer escalations and operational feedback
HR	Hiring, organization design, performance management and leadership development

5. Leadership Expectations

The Director of Engineering is expected to:

Own outcomes, not just activities.
Build systems and processes that allow teams to operate independently.
Make decisions using measurable engineering and business data.
Balance speed, quality, reliability, security, and cost.
Remove organizational bottlenecks rather than becoming another approval layer.
Develop strong engineering leaders instead of becoming the escalation point for every decision.
Establish accountability without unnecessary bureaucracy.
Maintain strong technical credibility while operating at an executive level.
Promote continuous improvement across the engineering organization.
Build an engineering organization that scales with the business.

6. Required Experience

15+ years of software engineering experience with significant engineering leadership experience.
Proven experience leading multiple engineering teams or engineering functions.
Experience managing Engineering Managers, Technical Leads, Architects, or equivalent senior leaders.
Strong experience in enterprise/product software engineering.
Experience owning engineering delivery and technology roadmaps.
Strong understanding of software architecture and distributed systems.
Experience with cloud-native platforms and modern DevOps practices.
Experience managing production-critical applications.
Experience establishing engineering metrics, OKRs, KPIs, and governance.
Strong experience with Agile/Scrum and iterative product development.
Experience managing technical debt and modernization initiatives.
Experience driving engineering automation and productivity improvements.
Experience with hiring, organization design, succession planning, and leadership development.

7. Educational Qualification

Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or a related field.
Equivalent professional experience may be considered.

8. Must-Have & Good-to-Have Capabilities

#	Capability	Must Have	Good to Have
1	Engineering Leadership	15+ years engineering experience; proven leadership of multiple engineering teams/functions	Experience leading 50+ engineers or multiple product engineering organizations
2	Delivery & Predictability	Roadmap execution, capacity planning, sprint/release management, dependency management and delivery governance	Large multi-product / multi-team portfolio management
3	People & Leadership Development	Develop Engineering Managers, Tech Leads and Architects; build self-sufficient teams	Succession planning and structured leadership development programs
4	Architecture & Scalability	Strong knowledge of scalable, distributed, event-driven and cloud-native architecture	Large-scale modernization, platform transformation or migration experience
5	Quality & Reliability	Quality engineering, automation, quality gates, CI/CD, observability, SLI/SLO and incident management	Organization-wide Quality Engineering / mature SRE transformation
6	Technical Debt & Performance	Drive technical-debt reduction, modernization, performance and scalability initiatives	Experience operating high-volume, mission-critical platforms
7	Engineering Governance & Metrics	Engineering OKRs/KPIs, delivery, quality, reliability and engineering-health metrics	DORA/SPACE, Engineering Councils or Architecture Boards
8	Security & Compliance	Secure SDLC, application security, data protection and compliance awareness	HIPAA, DPDP, ISO 27001, SOC 2, HL7/FHIR or healthcare experience
9	AI, Automation & Cloud	Strong automation mindset and understanding of modern cloud/DevOps practices	AI-assisted engineering, Kubernetes, platform engineering, GitOps and FinOps
10	Business & Executive Leadership	Align Engineering with Product/Business priorities; strong cross-functional and executive communication	Technology budget ownership, CXO/Board presentations and organization-wide transformation