ABOUT THE ROLE :

We are looking for a hands-on Engineering Manager with a strong Software Development Engineering (SDE) background who has personally designed, built, and shipped end-to-end products or platforms. You will own the engineering team's output, technical direction, development standards, and ability to deliver reliably. This is not a purely managerial role - you are expected to stay close to architecture, code and design reviews, critical debugging, and prototyping, while building enough capability and ownership in the team that you do not become the bottleneck.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES :

- Own engineering outcomes end to end - delivery, quality, reliability, security, and technical execution from requirement through production.

- Lead, manage, and develop the engineering team, including hiring, performance management, mentoring, role clarity, feedback, and career growth.

- Translate the business and product roadmap into technical plans, estimates, milestones, and capacity decisions; own engineering delivery commitments and escalations.

- Own the architecture of products and platforms, making scalable, secure, and maintainable choices across services, APIs, databases, and cloud infrastructure.

- Stay hands-on - review code and designs, solve critical technical problems, and prototype when useful - while creating distributed technical ownership within the team.

- Establish and continuously improve engineering practices across estimation, code review, testing, releases, CI/CD, observability, incident response, and postmortems.

- Build an AI-native engineering culture : use coding agents and LLM-assisted development to materially improve velocity while maintaining review, testing, security, and quality controls.

- Define and track engineering metrics such as delivery predictability, cycle time, defect rates, production incidents, and system reliability, and use them to drive improvement.

- Manage technical debt, performance, infrastructure cost, security, and resilience; surface and resolve technical risks before they become business problems.

- Partner closely with Product, QA, DevOps, Data, and business stakeholders; communicate technical trade-offs clearly and align scope, timing, resources, and quality.

REQUIRED SKILLS & EXPERIENCE :

- 8+ years of software development experience, including meaningful experience leading engineers or engineering teams.

- Demonstrable ownership of at least one end-to-end production product or platform, from concept and system design through launch, operation, and scaling.

- Strong hands-on coding experience in at least one modern stack (Node.js or Python), with familiarity with relevant front-end frameworks such as React / Next.js where applicable.

- Proven experience designing system architecture, including microservices, distributed systems, event-driven architecture, and API design (REST / GraphQL).

- Strong understanding of databases (SQL and NoSQL), caching strategies, data modeling, and performance considerations at scale.

- Working knowledge of cloud platforms (AWS / Azure / GCP) and cloud-native architecture and deployment patterns.

- Strong understanding of DevOps practices, including CI/CD, containerization (Docker / Kubernetes), infrastructure-as-code, monitoring, and observability.

- Demonstrated experience using AI coding agents and LLM-assisted development (OpenAI Codex, Claude Code, or equivalent) to deliver production systems or materially improve engineering productivity.

- Proven people leadership : hiring, coaching, performance management, handling difficult conversations, and raising the engineering bar.

- Strong business judgment and communication skills, with the ability to balance technical rigor with speed and explain trade-offs to non-technical stakeholders.

- Tier-1 engineering institute pedigree is a mandatory eligibility requirement for this role.

EDUCATIONAL QUALIFICATION :

- B.E. / B.Tech from a Tier-1 engineering institute (IITs, NITs, BITS Pilani, IIITs, or equivalent nationally recognized top-tier institutes) is required.

GOOD TO HAVE :

- Prior experience in a startup or fast-paced product environment.

- Experience with D2C, e-commerce, or other high-volume customer-facing platforms.

- Experience architecting high-traffic / high-availability systems at scale.

- Experience leading a lean engineering team where senior leaders remain technically hands-on.