Senior Director - Engineering

This role is for one of the Weekday's clients

Salary range: Rs 15000000 - Rs 20000000 (ie INR 150 - 200 LPA)

Min Experience: 15+ years

Location: Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India
JobType: full-time

We are seeking an accomplished Senior Director – Engineering with 15–27 years of experience to provide strategic and technical leadership across engineering teams, products, and large-scale technology initiatives. The ideal candidate will have a strong track record of building high-performing engineering organizations, delivering complex and scalable platforms, and driving technology strategy aligned with business objectives.

This role requires a senior technology leader who can operate at both strategic and technical levels, mentor engineering leaders, establish strong engineering practices, and champion innovation. Exposure to Agentic AI and modern AI-driven engineering approaches will be a strong advantage.

Key Responsibilities

• Define and execute the engineering strategy, architecture roadmap, and technology vision in alignment with organizational goals.
• Lead multiple engineering teams and senior technical leaders, fostering a culture of ownership, innovation, collaboration, and continuous improvement.
• Oversee the design, development, deployment, and scalability of highly reliable, secure, and high-performance technology platforms.
• Establish engineering standards, development methodologies, architecture principles, and best practices across teams.
• Partner closely with Product, Design, Data, Security, Operations, and Business leadership to translate business requirements into scalable technology solutions.
• Drive modernization initiatives, platform transformation, cloud adoption, automation, and engineering productivity improvements.
• Build and maintain strong technical leadership pipelines through mentoring, coaching, hiring, and succession planning.
• Own engineering execution, delivery quality, technical risks, resource planning, and organizational capacity.
• Evaluate emerging technologies and identify opportunities to leverage AI and automation to improve products, engineering workflows, and operational efficiency.
• Encourage experimentation and adoption of Agentic AI, AI-powered automation, intelligent workflows, and autonomous systems where appropriate.
• Establish metrics and governance mechanisms to monitor engineering productivity, reliability, quality, delivery, and business impact.
• Ensure engineering practices meet high standards for security, scalability, performance, compliance, and reliability.

Required Qualifications

• 15–27 years of overall experience in software engineering, technology, or engineering leadership.
• Significant experience leading large, distributed, or multi-disciplinary engineering organizations.
• Proven experience managing senior engineering managers, architects, principal engineers, and technical leaders.
• Strong understanding of software architecture, distributed systems, cloud platforms, APIs, microservices, databases, and modern engineering practices.
• Demonstrated success delivering large-scale, business-critical technology platforms and products.
• Strong organizational, stakeholder-management, communication, and strategic planning abilities.
• Experience driving engineering transformation, process optimization, and technology modernization initiatives.

Good-to-Have Skills

• Agentic AI
• Generative AI and LLM-based applications
• AI agents, autonomous workflows, and multi-agent systems
• AI-driven developer productivity and automation
• Cloud-native architecture and AI/ML infrastructure
• Experience integrating AI capabilities into enterprise products

Leadership Attributes

The ideal candidate is a strategic thinker and strong people leader who can balance long-term technology vision with execution. You should be comfortable navigating ambiguity, influencing senior stakeholders, making high-impact technical decisions, and building organizations capable of delivering innovative products at scale.