Vice President, Software Engineering

Overview

Lead software engineering teams building advanced payments technologies and applications, with ownership of release quality, platform modernization, AI adoption and engineering leadership.

What you'll do

• Own end-to-end release quality, safeguarding customer experience and platform trust across all deployments.
• Establish and enforce rigorous testing standards, release readiness criteria, and go/no-go decision frameworks.
• Drive risk management and defect containment strategies, including early detection, root-cause analysis, and preventive actions.
• Lead quality governance across development, testing, and production operations, ensuring predictable, stable releases.
• Champion engineering accountability for production health, incident reduction, and operational excellence.
• Partner with Product, Operations, and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) teams to ensure resilience, observability, and recoverability.
• Define and execute the technology modernization roadmap, reducing technical debt while improving scalability, resilience, and efficiency.
• Lead transformation initiatives including legacy platform modernization, cloud-native and hybrid architectures, and microservices, API-first, and event-driven systems.
• Drive continuous improvement in engineering productivity, deployment velocity, and cost efficiency.
• Ensure architectural consistency, security, and compliance across platforms and regions.
• Evaluate and adopt emerging technologies aligned with long-term business and platform strategy.
• Drive AI adoption across the engineering organization, embedding intelligence into development, testing, operations, and decision-making.
• Sponsor AI-enabled capabilities such as test automation and intelligent defect detection, predictive analytics for risk and capacity management, and AI-assisted development and productivity tools.
• Partner with business and data leaders to ensure AI delivers measurable outcomes, not experimentation alone.
• Establish responsible AI practices covering governance, explainability, security, and ethical use.
• Lead, mentor, and inspire senior engineering leaders and managers across geographies.
• Build a culture of quality-first engineering, ownership, continuous learning, and innovation.
• Develop succession planning, upskilling strategies, and cross-functional talent mobility.
• Foster collaboration across Product, Architecture, Operations, Security, and Business stakeholders.
• Act as a trusted engineering partner to senior executives, providing clear visibility into risk, quality, delivery, and modernization progress.
• Communicate complex technical topics in a concise, executive-ready manner.
• Manage strategic vendor and partner relationships to ensure delivery excellence and innovation.

What you'll need

• Hands-on technical and people leader able to manage directly and through others.
• Technically astute, with recognized subject matter expertise that allows you to dive deep into your teams' work.
• Strong verbal and written communication skills, able to communicate efficiently with a wide range of audiences.
• Obsessed with results, able to communicate objectives and how success will be measured.
• Strong decision-making skills with a bias for action rather than drawn-out analysis.
• Experience leading retrospection and continuously improving as a result.
• Strong collaborative and organizational skills, valuing transparency over avoiding scrutiny.
• Ability to guide team members' careers, including performance evaluation, coaching, and motivation.
• Experienced manager able to evaluate and coach other managers.
• Experience in distributed system design and implementation, with understanding of how high-performance, high-reliability, large-scale distributed systems are built and operated.
• Expert-level knowledge of software development processes, practicing Agile at an advanced level.
• Experience and knowledge of Test Driven Development (TDD) and Domain Driven Development (DDD).
• Experienced user of one or more Application Lifecycle Management tools (e.g., Rally, Jira).
• Good Payments/Card industry knowledge, and ability to read and understand a business case.

Details

• Location: Pune, India.