Dharma Life - Chief Technology Officer

Role Summary

The CTO role is essential in delivering technology services that will help Dharma Life maintain its position as India's leading rural distribution network and enable it to reach 50 million consumers by 2020.

Primary Responsibilities:

- Lead Dharma Life's IT strategy to achieve the organisation's business goals, including managing associated resources and budgets to deliver it. Overall responsibility of delivery and maintenance of Dharma Life's technology platforms and systems.

- Lead and manage designated projects within time and budget and ensure that objectives were accomplished in accordance with outlined priorities.

- Negotiate contracts with several service providers.

- Hiring a suitable team and guiding them to delivery excellent qualitative and quantitative performance management to assess progress/quality/performance.

- Lead the design, development and deployment of the identified disruptive technology innovations that can materially impact Dharma Life's growth potential (which are being supported by DFID)

- Establish IT governance processes to ensure risk management and optimum utilization of resources

- Identify technology trends and evolving social behaviour that may support or impede the success of the business e.g. Mobile Money in rural India

- Provide strong effective leadership and create an environment which attracts and retains talents

Desired Skills & Experience:

- A Bachelor's degree with post graduate qualification in an information technology related subject

- Over 12 years- hands-on technical experience working with enterprise software application development and implementation, IT infrastructure building, and designing and deploying innovative technology solutions with at least 3 years in a senior supervisory capacity

- Experience of working with the Microsoft Technology suite, Windows Server, Active Directory and related technologies

- Knowledge and experience of Application development platforms like Java, Mendix.

Practical knowledge/experience in:

- Implementing solutions using cloud-computing services from the major cloud service vendors

- Database administration and management - Oracle 10g/11i

- Experience in running office infrastructure technology services - networking solutions, security LAN/WAN server implementation, troubleshooting and end user support

- Experience in scaling and operating Open Source technologies such as Linux, Apache, MySQL, and Java

- Mobile device management and application deployment after rigorous testing

- Successful SAP ERP implementation experience

- Knowledge of popular CRM tools like Salesforce, Oracle, Open-source CRM - Sugar, vtiger, etc.

- Knowledge of calling technologies for Automatic Call Distributor, Call recording, IVR, VoIP, etc.

- Mobile (iOS, Android) and web (Python/Ruby/PHP/HTML5/CSS/jQuery, etc.) application development experience

- Mapping business requirements, designing customized solutions and planning test strategies

- Demonstrable record of delivery of complex outcomes on time and to budget

- Demonstrated experience of working in complex, multi-vendor, multi-technology environment for the delivery of technology operations services

- Ability to articulate ideas to both technical and non-technical audiences

Travel Requirement:

- You should be able to travel within and outside country as required in order to meet vendors, key stakeholders and other Dharma Life team members, as per business necessity.

- Dharma Life is a pioneering award winning business, created in 2009, that is driving sustainable economic growth in rural India, by creating jobs and building a market for socially impactful world class products that improve lives and livelihoods.

- As of, June 2014, Dharma Life has improved over 2 million livelihoods - with a network of more than 3,000 village entrepreneurs operating across six states in India (Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, Bihar, Karnataka, Gujarat and Rajasthan).

Dharma Life works to:

1. Build a national network of rural entrepreneurs (Dharma Life Entrepreneurs) by providing business training, mentoring and support to people with high potential in rural villages.

2. Activate market demand by raising awareness of the economic and social value of these products to rural customers.

3. Create a sustainable value chain for - social impact- products by working with manufacturers, distributors and local retailers.

Dharma Life Goals:-

By 2020 we aim to:

- Create a network of 100,000 Dharma Life entrepreneurs out of which 50% are female entrepreneurs

- Serve 50 million rural low income consumers

- Expand our network across India and globally