Director, AI Engineering

Overview

Lead the strategy, architecture, delivery, and operational excellence of Couchbase AI Cloud Platform capabilities. This strategic leadership role spans distributed systems, cloud-native platforms, and AI, with responsibility for a large, multi-layered engineering organization.

What you'll do

• Lead and grow high-performing engineering teams focused on building the Operational Data platform for AI.
• Drive architectural decisions for multiple platform capabilities at the intersection of Databases, PaaS and AI.
• Ensure production-grade scalability for large-scale workloads.
• Partner closely with Product, Field, Support, and Customer Success to deliver differentiated enterprise AI capabilities.
• Balance innovation with operational rigour and ensure reliability, performance, and security standards are met.
• Build strong cross-functional collaboration with core database, storage, and cloud infrastructure teams.
• Partner cross-functionally at the executive level.
• Manage risk, investment, and efficiency.
• Mentor engineering managers and senior technical leaders to build a strong leadership team.
• Drive execution excellence at scale by establishing metrics and KPIs for engineering performance, reliability, and productivity.

What you'll need

• 15+ years of experience in software engineering, with 5+ years leading multiple teams.
• Strong background in distributed systems, databases, or large-scale cloud platforms.
• Deep experience in cloud platforms: AWS, GCP, Azure.
• Hands-on familiarity with data and AI infrastructure concepts such as vector search and indexing.
• Hands-on familiarity with retrieval augmented generation (RAG).
• Hands-on familiarity with embedding pipelines.
• Hands-on familiarity with LLM and inference systems.
• Hands-on familiarity with agent architectures and memory systems.
• Experience building and operating production SaaS services at scale.
• Deep understanding of performance engineering, reliability, and cost optimization in cloud environments.
• Experience in Go, Python or Java.

Details

• Location: Bangalore, India.
• Hybrid work mode, with at least 3 days per week in the office.