Head/Director of Engineering

Experience: 20+ years in Software Engineering

Location: Kolkata/Bangalore

Reporting to: CTO

Team Size: 50+ Engineering professionals

About Company:

Company is an Indian video intelligence and technology company building solutions across Video Management Systems (VMS), AI Video Analytics, Traffic Management, Face Recognition, Cloud/VSaaS and Edge Computing.

Our technology is deployed across 150+ cities, enterprises, public-sector organisations and critical infrastructure, with more than 300,000 cameras streaming through our platform. Our engineering organisation works across video streaming, computer vision, AI, cloud, edge, embedded systems and enterprise-scale platforms.

We are looking for an experienced Head/Director of Engineering to lead our engineering organization and play a critical role in scaling our technology platform for the next phase of growth across India, the US, MEA and APAC.

The Opportunity:

This is a hands-on engineering leadership role for someone who enjoys solving complex technology and scale problems not simply managing delivery.

You will own engineering across a large, mission-critical video platform where performance, reliability, scalability, security and cost efficiency directly impact customer outcomes.

Our platform operates across on-premise, edge and cloud environments, supporting demanding video workloads and large-scale deployments. The role will involve modernizing a mature technology platform while continuing to deliver for existing customers.

Key Responsibilities:

1. Engineering Strategy & Architecture:

- Define and execute the 2 - 3 year engineering and architecture roadmap in partnership with the CTO/founder.

- Drive convergence across on-premise, edge and cloud architectures.

- Build scalable architectures for video streaming, AI/ML inference, analytics and distributed platforms.

- Drive the evolution towards multimodal video intelligence and GenAI-enabled capabilities.

- Ensure technology decisions balance innovation, scalability, reliability and cost.

2. Engineering Delivery:

- Own engineering delivery across the complete product portfolio.

- Ensure predictable releases, high quality and adherence to engineering commitments.

- Establish strong engineering processes around planning, development, testing, release and production support.

- Work closely with Product, R&D, Presales, Sales and Technical Support to deliver customer commitments.

- Lead engineering execution for large government and enterprise programmes.

3. Performance & Scalability:

- Make performance, latency, channel density and cost per camera core engineering metrics.

- Improve video processing and inference efficiency across GPU, edge and cloud environments.

- Drive optimisation of video pipelines and distributed systems at scale.

- Ensure the platform can support increasing camera volumes without compromising reliability or customer experience.

4. Technology & Product Engineering:

- Lead engineering across: Video Management Systems, Video Streaming, AI/Computer Vision, Video Analytics, Traffic Management, Face Recognition, Cloud/VSaaS, Edge Computing, Embedded Systems, QA & Automation.

- Ensure architectural consistency across multiple deployment environments.

- Modernise legacy systems while continuing to support a large installed customer base.

5. Reliability, Security & Quality:

- Own engineering standards for uptime, data integrity, backward compatibility and security.

- Establish robust engineering practices for mission-critical and large-scale deployments.

- Ensure compliance with relevant government and security standards, including STQC and government-grade benchmarks.

- Build engineering systems that can operate reliably under real-world field conditions.

6. AI & Engineering Productivity:

- Drive responsible adoption of AI-assisted software development and agentic engineering tools.

- Establish guidelines for the use of AI-generated code, including code review, security, provenance and quality controls.

- Identify opportunities to improve engineering productivity without compromising reliability or security.

- Partner with R&D on productization of deep-learning and computer-vision systems.

7. People & Organisation Leadership:

- Lead and develop a 50+ member engineering organisation across systems, AI/CV, platform, embedded engineering and QA.

- Build a strong second line of Engineering Managers, Senior Managers and Architects.

- Hire, develop and retain high-quality engineering talent.

- Build succession and leadership capability within the engineering organisation.

- Address organisational bottlenecks, single points of failure and capability gaps.

- Create a culture of ownership, accountability, technical excellence and continuous improvement.

8. Customer & Business Partnership:

- Act as the engineering face of the organisation for strategic customers, partners and system integrators.

- Participate in critical customer escalations and solution discussions.

- Translate customer and market requirements into engineering priorities.

- Partner with Product and Business teams to align technology investments with business objectives.

What We Are Looking For:

Essential Experience & Skills:

- 20+ years of experience in designing software architecture for distributed computing platform with at least 8+ years leading large engineering teams, including managers.

- Strong experience leading engineering organisations of 50+ professionals.

- Proven experience owning products at scale across architecture, quality, performance and cost.

- Strong understanding of cloud technologies and distributed systems.

- Hands-on technical depth in one or more of: C++, Java, Golang, Real-time video/streaming, High-performance computing, Distributed platforms.

- Strong understanding of image processing, AI and computer vision.

- Ability to review architecture and code and challenge technical decisions credibly.

- Experience with production-grade deep-learning systems, including: Model accuracy, Inference performance, Cost optimisation, Evaluation methodology, Production monitoring.

- Demonstrated experience hiring, developing and retaining strong engineering talent.

- Experience turning around a challenging engineering team, product or programme.

- Strong experience working in a high-ownership, fast-paced technology environment.

Strongly Preferred:

- Experience in one or more of the following will be highly valuable: Video Management Systems / Video Analytics, Video streaming and media pipelines, GStreamer / FFmpeg, ONVIF / RTSP, Edge AI / inference, NVIDIA Jetson / TensorRT, ONNX Runtime / OpenVINO, MLOps and model drift detection, On-premise to multi-tenant SaaS transformation, Public-sector / government technology deployments, Large-scale enterprise or critical-infrastructure programmes, Tender-driven technology environments and compliance audits.

Leadership Expectations:

- We are looking for a leader who is technically credible and intellectually curious.

- Remains close enough to technology to understand complex engineering problems.

- Communicates bad news early and transparently.

- Takes ownership rather than waiting for perfect processes or information.

- Can balance short-term delivery with long-term architecture.

- Is comfortable making difficult technology and people decisions.

- Builds strong leaders rather than becoming the single point of decision-making.

- Treats privacy, security and responsible AI as fundamental engineering responsibilities.

Why Join Company?:

- Lead engineering for a large-scale video intelligence platform.

- Work across AI, computer vision, cloud, edge, video streaming and distributed systems.

- Influence technology strategy across India and international markets.

- Work directly with senior leadership and the technology leadership team.

- Own technology that operates in the real world across smart cities, transportation, banking, manufacturing, education, aviation and retail.

- Opportunity to build and scale a strong engineering organisation from Kolkata.

- Leadership role with visibility across research, product development, production and field deployment.

- If you are passionate about leading an innovative, energetic, and technology-driven engineering team, we invite you to be part of Company' growth journey!