India Site Leader - Software Engineering - Hospitality Technology
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About the Role
We are hiring a Site Leader for India engineering organization in Hyderabad accountable for entire India software engineering organization across multiple product lines. You will lead approx. 150+ engineers across multiple product lines, managing through a team of Engineering Managers and Senior Engineering Managers. You will drive architectural decisions, set engineering and quality standards, manage the India engineering budget, and be directly accountable for reliability and customer outcomes.
What You Will Do
- Lead architectural decisions on systems owned by the India team. Write and co-author technical strategy documents for major initiatives.
- Be personally present in design reviews, code reviews on critical changes, post-incident reviews, and resolution of major production issues.
- Drive a steady reduction in technical debt, including legacy components inherited from past acquisitions. Balance this against customer impact, cost, and risk.
- Stay technically current enough to be respected by your senior engineers. You should be comfortable in the codebase, in cloud platforms, in CI/CD tooling, and in data systems, even if you are not coding day to day.
- Push the team toward modern engineering practices: trunk-based development, continuous integration, automated testing, infrastructure as code, and DORA metrics.
Engineering Management
- Lead a team of Engineering Managers and Senior Engineering Managers. Build a strong manager bench at every level.
- Set clear performance expectations. Run quarterly calibration cycles. Make hiring and performance decisions with conviction and defend them.
- Coach your managers on how to hire well, handle performance issues, make technical calls, resolve conflict, and manage stakeholders.
- Run a consistent engineering cadence across the India org: sprint planning, standups, retrospectives, and incident reviews. Keep this in sync with our global rhythm while respecting Indian working hours.
- Build and maintain career ladders and promotion criteria for engineers and managers in India, aligned with our global engineering frameworks.
India Site Leadership
- Set the culture and tone of the India engineering organization: high standards, strong ownership, customer focus, and pride in technical craft.
- Own attrition. Build a retention strategy that fits the Indian tech labor market, covering compensation positioning, career growth, technical brand, manager quality, and work environment.
- Work closely with HR, Talent Acquisition, Finance, Legal, and Facilities on hiring strategy, compensation philosophy, immigration, office operations, statutory benefits, and Indian labor law compliance.
- Represent the organization to local universities, industry bodies, and the broader engineering community. Build our technical employer brand in India.
- Ensure compliance with Indian regulations including the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, applicable labor laws, and statutory obligations.
AI and Engineering Capability
- Grow the India team's AI and ML engineering capability in line with our enterprise AI strategy. This includes building teams and skills in LLM-powered product features, retrieval-augmented generation, agentic patterns, evaluation frameworks, MLOps, model monitoring, drift detection, and retraining pipelines.
- Drive adoption of AI-assisted engineering tools within the India team. Measure and report productivity outcomes.
- Ensure that AI features built or operated from India meet our standards for safety, evaluation, and customer trust, and comply with applicable AI regulation including the EU AI Act and emerging Indian AI guidance.
- Identify and grow AI technical leaders within the India org who can own this capability long term.
Cross-Region Collaboration
- Work with global engineering leaders as a peer. India should be a site with full product ownership, not a downstream shop.
- Set up clear operating norms for handoffs, on-call rotations, design reviews, and decision-making that allow a 24-hour engineering organization to function well without burning out any region.
- Advocate for India's working hours, public holidays, and cultural context when working with global colleagues. At the same time, hold the India team to the same standards for quality, responsiveness, and collaboration.
- Travel internationally on a regular cadence to build relationships with regional teams and strategic customers.
Product and Stakeholder Partnership
- Work with Product Management on roadmap planning, scoping, prioritization, and tradeoffs for India-led product areas.
- Engage directly with strategic customers when needed: technical escalations, architecture conversations, and executive-level discussions.
- Partner with Customer Support and Customer Success on engineering quality issues, incident communication, and remediation commitments.
- Support Sales Engineering and Solutions Architecture with technical pre-sales work that originates from India.
Operations, Quality, and Reliability
- Own customer-facing reliability for India-operated systems. This includes SLAs and SLOs, on-call rotations, observability, capacity planning, and disaster recovery readiness.
- Establish and enforce a unified software development lifecycle across India teams: secure coding, peer review, automated testing, deployment automation, and release governance.
- Drive measurable improvement in DORA metrics and customer-reported defect rates.
- Own the India engineering budget. This includes headcount planning, vendor and tooling spend, and cloud cost management.
Security, Privacy, and Compliance
- Own the security posture of software built and operated by the India team, in partnership with our enterprise security and compliance leadership.
- Ensure the India engineering organization meets requirements under SOC 2 Type II, PCI-DSS, ISO 27001, GDPR, CCPA, and the Indian DPDP Act.
- Champion security-by-design and privacy-by-design across India engineering teams. Ensure secure coding training is current and the team is audit-ready.
What You Will Bring
Experience
- 10 or more years in software engineering, including at least 5 years managing managers as a Director or VP at a B2B SaaS or enterprise software company.
- Experience leading an engineering organization of 100 or more engineers as a senior site leader at a global company, ideally where India was treated as a strategic capability and not just a cost center.
- A strong track record of building, scaling, and retaining engineering teams in the Indian tech market, including hiring senior engineers and managers in a competitive environment.
- Shipped cloud-native, multi-tenant SaaS products at meaningful scale with direct accountability for reliability and customer outcomes.
- Hands-on technical credibility. You are comfortable in code reviews, architecture discussions, incident response, and technical interviews. Senior engineers respect you as a peer, not just as a manager.
- Experience working across time zones with US and EMEA product, engineering, and executive leadership.
- Prior engineering leadership experience in hospitality technology, hotel distribution, or guest engagement platforms. This is required for this role.
Technical Skills
- Deep understanding of cloud-native, distributed systems and multi-tenant SaaS architecture on AWS, Azure, or GCP.
- Strong hands-on depth in at least one major backend engineering stack used in production B2B SaaS, with working familiarity in data systems, messaging platforms, and observability tooling.
- Fluent in modern engineering practices: trunk-based development, CI/CD pipelines, automated testing at scale, infrastructure as code, and DORA metrics.
- Working knowledge of AI and ML systems in production, including LLM application architecture, RAG pipelines, MLOps, and AI cost and performance tradeoffs. Deeper AI experience is preferred.
- Familiarity with security and compliance frameworks: SOC 2, PCI-DSS, GDPR, and India's DPDP Act.
Leadership and Mindset
- You have a track record of attracting and retaining strong engineering managers and senior engineers in India.
- You communicate clearly in written and spoken English and are comfortable presenting to executives and customers.
- You take ownership, move fast, and are willing to make and defend difficult decisions.
- You are effective working with US and European counterparts and understand how to navigate cultural differences.
- You genuinely enjoy coaching and developing the leaders around you. You manage by outcomes and use data to track what matters.
Education
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience integrating engineering teams from acquired companies into a unified operating model.
- Experience leading or growing an AI and ML engineering capability within a production B2B SaaS business.
- Active presence in the Indian engineering community through speaking engagements, mentoring, or university partnerships.
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