Key Responsibilities:

Engineering Leadership:

- Directly manage and lead the engineering team and stay hands-on in architecture, code reviews, debugging, and critical production issues.

- Own real technical decisions: technology choices, design trade-offs, technical debt, and release management; break product requirements into engineering deliverables with clear ownership.

- Establish sound engineering practices (coding standards, testing, security, release discipline) and own APIs/integrations with bureaus, banks, payment systems, KYC providers, and finance systems.

- Take direct accountability for code quality, delivery timelines, and production stability, including root-cause analysis during incidents; mentor engineers and hold the team to delivery standards.

Product Ownership & Delivery:

- Own the end-to-end product lifecycle: vision, roadmap, priorities, requirements, user journeys, and acceptance criteria, working directly with Credit, Operations, Finance, Collections, Risk, and Compliance.

- Design integrated workflows across onboarding, application, credit assessment, approval, disbursement, servicing, and closure, with strong controls - validations, maker-checker, approval matrices, audit trails, and exception handling.

- Ensure integration across LOS, loan management, finance, payments, and risk systems, and build workflows that scale without proportional manual effort.

- Own delivery from discovery through UAT, go-live, and stabilisation; ensure releases meet functional, security, performance, and compliance requirements; use production and stakeholder feedback to drive continuous improvement.

Candidate Profile:

- Experience: 7 - 9 years of hands-on software engineering experience, including at least 2 - 3 years directly managing or leading an engineering team as an Engineering Manager, Engineering Lead, or equivalent (preferable).

- Must have started as a hands-on Software Engineer writing and shipping production code, then grown into engineering leadership and product ownership.

- Does not qualify: experience limited to coordinating with engineers as a PM/BA, leading a cross-functional pod without direct people/delivery ownership, or building a PoC/prototype.

- Working, hands-on ability to review architecture, participate in code reviews, troubleshoot production issues, and guide implementation alongside strong product instinct to define requirements, priorities, and user journeys.

- Strong understanding of system architecture, APIs, databases, security, and production operations, plus lending processes and financial workflows (LOS, loan management, digital lending experience is a plus, not mandatory).

- NBFC/fintech/bank/financial-technology experience preferred; strong software-engineering and engineering-team-management background is essential regardless of domain.

- Education: Bachelor's in Computer Science, Engineering, IT, or related field preferred; MBA/PM certification a plus, not mandatory.