Director of Engineering

Serko Ltd.; Bengaluru; On-site; INR 2,000,000 - 3,000,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive base pay

Medical Benefits

Discretionary incentive plan

Access to learning & development platform

Flexible work policy

Job summary

Serko Ltd. in Bengaluru is looking for a Director of Engineering to lead their engineering department, manage team performance, and oversee AI integrations in their platform. The ideal candidate will possess strong strategic leadership abilities and a thorough understanding of AI-native engineering principles.

The role requires extensive experience in engineering leadership, relationship management, and a Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in a highly technical field. Serko promotes a dynamic work environment with benefits like a competitive pay structure, medical benefits, and flexible work policies.

Qualifications

• Experience in strategic engineering leadership and managing cross-domain dependencies.
• Proven ability to scale platforms and optimize API-first foundations.
• Strong capability to deliver insights and narratives for C-suite executives.

Responsibilities

• Lead overall engineering activities, ensuring alignment with company strategy.
• Manage a high-performance culture and foster team retention.
• Oversee AI integrations and platform health.

Skills

Strategic engineering leadership

Stakeholder management

AI-native engineering principles

Data-driven insights

Performance management

Education

Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field

Job description

Serko is a cutting-edge tech platform in global business travel & expense technology. When you join Serko, you become part of a team of passionate travellers and technologists bringing people together, using the world’s leading business travel marketplace. We are proud to be an equal opportunity employer, we embrace the richness of diversity, showing up authentically to create a positive impact. There’s an exciting road ahead of us, where travel needs real, impactful change.

With offices in New Zealand, Australia, North America, and China, we are thrilled to be expanding our global footprint, landing our growing and established hub in Bengaluru, India. With rapid a growth plan in place for India, we’re hiring people from different backgrounds, experiences, abilities, and perspectives to help us build a world-class team and product.

As a Director of Engineering at Serko, you own the delivery, performance, and overall effectiveness of your department. You will provide strategic leadership to your engineering management team, fostering a high‑performance culture that aligns with our overarching technology strategy and company goals.

In this specific role targeting Serko.ai, you will oversee the critical platform shared services and AI integrations that fuel our next‑generation product suite.

Key Responsibilities

• Leadership: Partner seamlessly with the current Director of Engineering (Platform India) to manage overall platform health, while taking clear, primary accountability for the success of the Serko.ai + Platform partnership.
• Strategic Alignment: Collaborate closely with the Director of Product and peer Directors of Engineering to execute a cohesive engineering strategy.
• Pioneering AI‑Native Solutions: Drive a core focus on Agentic Engineering, delivering scalable platform services that establish the team as an elite, highly credible delivery partner.

What you’ll do

• Overall responsibility for all Engineering activity within a department including delivery and execution across Common Domain and Common Platform Foundations, system health, and cost effectiveness.
• Team management, including hiring, workforce allocation, driving high performance, ensuring team health and retention management.
• Accountable for Serko.ai launch dependencies and capability sequencing. Primary India engineering interface for Serko.ai stakeholders and critical escalation partner to VP Engineering for any Serko.ai launch risks.
• Driver of Agentic Engineering focus & adoption across platform squads, ensuring infrastructure is designed to natively support model‑driven and agentic product experiences.
• Co‑own CI/CD pipeline health, deployment velocity, and rollback standards.
• Maintain compliance, security gate pass rates, and observability standards, escalating risks immediately.
• Consume data engineering output from a shared pod and align on sequencing decisions.
• Co‑author and co‑present quarterly roadmap to the VP Engineering and department leads, ensuring full visibility on cross‑domain dependencies.
• Line manager for Senior Principal Engineer(s), Senior Manager(s), Engineering, and any other specialist roles that may be required.

What you’ll bring to the team

• Demonstrable experience in strategic engineering leadership, scaling platforms and managing cross‑domain dependencies.
• Proven track record of building and optimizing API‑first common platform foundations.
• Deep understanding of AI‑native engineering principles and experience delivering agentic or model‑driven infrastructure.
• Strong stakeholder management skills, capable of co‑leading in a matrixed environment and interfacing directly with BU engineering and product heads.
• Expert at delivering data‑driven insights to the C‑Suite (CTO, VP). Ability to simplify technical complexity into executive‑ready narratives and negotiate cross‑functional trade‑offs.
• Experienced in high‑performing teams through structured succession planning, strategic recruitment, and ensuring consistency in performance standards across multiple units.
• Leads the delivery strategy for the business unit portfolio, managing high‑level risks and enforcing excellence standards to ensure predictability and scalability.
• Ability to translate segment strategy into functional execution plans, contributing to the development of corporate‑wide evaluation criteria for projects and people.
• Skilled in creating qualitative and quantitative measures to drive BU‑wide performance, embedding data‑driven decision‑making into leadership practices at all levels.
• Shapes the AI roadmap for the business unit; partners with Product and Data leaders to embed AI into platforms while building organizational readiness for AI adoption.
• Champions technology and process improvements at the organizational level, empowering managers to test and scale new approaches to eliminate systemic inefficiencies.
• Models adaptability and resilience during organizational change, using high emotional intelligence to resolve cross‑unit conflicts and inspire trust across the business.
• Proven experience managing budgets for headcount, tooling, and infrastructure, ensuring optimal resource allocation and cost‑benefit alignment.
• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related highly technical field.

At Serko we aim to create a place where people can come and do their best work. This means you’ll be operating in an environment with great tools and support to enable you to perform at the highest level of your abilities, producing high‑quality, and delivering innovative and efficient results. Our people are fully engaged, continuously improving, and encouraged to make an impact.

Benefits

• Some of the benefits of working at Serko are:
• A competitive base pay
• Medical Benefits
• Discretionary incentive plan based on individual and company performance
• Focus on development: Access to a learning & development platform and opportunity for you to own your career pathways
• Flexible work policy.