Job Description :

Director Engineering -B2B SaaS platforms (logistics/manufacturing )

Department : Product & Engineering

Location : Chennai (Onsite) Engagement : Full-Time

Experience : 12 to 14 Years (5+ Years in Engineering Leadership)

Role Overview :

As we scale our SaaS platform across enterprise manufacturing and construction customers, engineering excellence will be a defining lever of competitive advantage.

We are seeking a strategic, hands-on Director Product Engineering to lead and scale our engineering organization (30 to 40 members), drive technology direction, and ensure predictable, high-quality SaaS product delivery aligned with business outcomes.

This role demands a leader who can think architecture, act execution, and build culture someone comfortable operating at both system design depth and CXO-level strategic conversations.

Key Responsibilities :

1. Engineering Leadership & Culture :

- Define and enforce best practices in architecture, code quality, testing, deployment, and documentation.

- Drive a culture of ownership, velocity, accountability, and continuous improvement.

- Provide strong technical thought leadership to advance platform innovation.

- Collaborate closely with CXOs and cross-functional leaders to align engineering output with customer and business priorities.

- Ensure engineering excellence without compromising delivery velocity.

- Drive AI-first engineering practices to improve developer productivity, code quality, testing, and operational efficiency.

2. Product Execution & Delivery Governance :

- Own product milestones, release planning, deployment cycles, and execution predictability.

- Prioritize technical initiatives, infrastructure investments, and tech debt resolution.

- Improve delivery governance and introduce measurable engineering KPIs.

- Stay ahead of emerging technologies and industry best practices relevant to SaaS and logistics tech.

- Introduce AI-assisted development workflows and engineering automation to improve delivery velocity.

3. Platform Architecture & Scalability :

- Own architectural decisions for scalability, performance, reliability, and security.

- Lead the adoption of modern frameworks and evolving technology stacks.

- Ensure robust CI/CD pipelines, observability frameworks, and incident response processes.

- Strengthen system resilience and production reliability in enterprise environments.

- Define platform modernization and cloud-native architecture strategy.

- Drive adoption of AI-enabled platform capabilities, intelligent automation, and data-driven product experiences.

4. Strategic Stakeholder Management :

- Act as the key technical voice in leadership and roadmap discussions.

- Align engineering strategy with founders, product leadership, and GTM teams.

- Translate business goals into technology execution plans.

- Support enterprise customers where deep technical alignment is required.

5. Team Building & Process Excellence :

- Lead, mentor, and scale a high-performing engineering team of 30 to 40 members.

- Strengthen leadership bench within engineering.

- Institutionalize Agile practices, sprint rituals, release discipline, and performance reviews.

- Build a transparent, collaborative, feedback-driven culture.

- Improve development velocity while maintaining quality standards.

Success Metrics / KPIs :

- Predictable on-time release cycles

- Reduction in tech debt and production incidents

- Platform scalability & performance benchmarks

- Engineering team engagement & retention

- Delivery velocity improvements

- Architecture modernization milestones achieved

- Alignment between product roadmap and engineering execution

Skills & Qualifications :

Experience :

- 12+ years in software engineering

- 5+ years in engineering leadership roles within enterprise SaaS

- Proven experience building and leading distributed engineering teams

- Strong exposure to B2B SaaS platforms (logistics/manufacturing preferred)

Technical Expertise :

- Strong hands-on coding ability with deep problem-solving orientation

- Experience across the full SDLC including production support

- System architecture & scalable platform design expertise

- Database design : MySQL, NoSQL

- Backend stack : NodeJS, Kafka, Redis, ActiveMQ, RabbitMQ, Solr

- Frontend exposure : ReactJS

- Experience with AWS, Java, RESTful APIs, container-based applications

- Strong CI/CD, code-repo, and release management experience

- Experience implementing AI/ML-driven capabilities is a plus

Leadership & Behavioral Competencies :

- Strategic thinking with execution discipline

- High ownership mindset

- Strong stakeholder management capability

- Data-driven decision-making

- Comfort operating in a high-growth, performance-oriented startup

- Ability to balance innovation with operational stability

- Experience leading AI/ML, GenAI, LLM, or intelligent automation initiatives in enterprise products.

- Familiarity with AI engineering ecosystems, including AI APIs, RAG architectures, vector databases, and agent-based systems.

- Experience leveraging AI-assisted engineering tools such as GitHub Copilot, Claude Code, Cursor, or equivalent platforms