Engineering Director

Dezerv; Bengaluru; On-site; INR 6,000,000 - 10,000,000; Full time

Job summary

Dezerv, India's investing platform for high-net-worth families, seeks a Senior Engineering Manager to own strategic direction across multiple teams and domains, guiding senior engineers and managers.

You will scale core platform capabilities, deepen data and decisioning infrastructure, and embed AI into how we build and operate. The role requires strong leadership, architecture depth, fintech experience, and a bias for building fast, reliable software.

Qualifications

• Leadership and people management at scale
• Experience guiding architecture across multiple teams
• Strong backend and distributed systems knowledge

Responsibilities

• Own the strategic direction across business and technology domains
• Scale platform capabilities and data infrastructure
• Embed AI into development workflows and product surfaces
• Partner with founders and heads across org to shape platform roadmap

Skills

Leadership

Engineering leadership

Distributed systems

Backend architectures

API design

Data infrastructure

AI adoption

Hiring senior engineers

Tools

AI tooling

LLMs

Job description

Dezerv's next chapter runs on AI, data, and architecture that can scale with us and the person who leads that build will shape what this platform becomes.

Engineering here isn't executing a roadmap someone else wrote. It's deciding what gets built, what gets killed, and where AI actually changes the game for a platform handling sensitive financial data at real scale.

Dezerv is a house of investing solutions for India's high-net-worth and affluent families, co-founded by Sandeep Jethwani, Vaibhav Porwal, and Sahil Contractor who between them have run over USD 7 billion in assets across JP Morgan, UBS, and BNP Paribas. We're backed by Premji Invest, Accel, Elevation, and Matrix, and our clients have trusted us with over ₹17,000+ crore of their wealth.

Investing is stressful. Building wealth is slow and unforgiving. We're building the platform that fixes that deep investment expertise, paired with technology, minus the cost and anxiety of a traditional advisory relationship. We've grown fast because we're genuinely good at this, transparent on fees, and modern in how we build.

What are we trying to solve/mission?

We are passionate about helping Indians invest better. We manage investments with active oversight to help both sophisticated and new investors build long-term wealth across various market conditions.

About the Role

We're looking for a Senior Engineering Manager to lead independently across ambiguous business and technology domains at a pivotal moment for Dezerv. This is a Business Partner level role: you'll own the strategic direction of an entire business or multiple businesses irrespective of product boundaries, managing multiple teams or a significantly large single team — of senior engineers and the managers who lead them.

Our roadmap ahead is ambitious scaling core platform capabilities, deepening our data and decisioning infrastructure, and embedding AI into how we build and how our product works. You'll set that direction, not just execute against it, partnering with founders and department heads to shape what Dezerv's platform becomes next.

What You'll Own

• Manage multiple teams (or a significantly large single team) spanning multiple job families, composed of senior engineers (SDE-3 and Tech Leads) and the engineering managers who lead them
• Grow senior engineers into principal engineers consistently, and develop engineering managers into independent leaders creating new opportunities and areas for your most senior people to grow further
• Hire senior and principal engineers independently, and build the team structures, communication channels, and accountability mechanisms that bring predictability to execution across the organisation
• Instill a culture of high ownership, technical rigor, innovation, and intellectual honesty about tradeoffs where teams take calculated risks without fearing failure.
• Build structured feedback loops, development plans, and career paths that help engineers grow, not just deliver.

Technical & Business Direction

• Own the overall business vision and annual (1-year+) roadmap in partnership with business, product, and design and drive the decisions required to achieve it independently, even where the business opportunity and architectural strategy are both unknown
• Understand the strategic importance of technology to the business and influence larger priorities and trade-offs build vs. buy vs. outsource vs. AI-assisted and decide the future of a product or architecture (improve, invent, deprecate, simplify)
• Champion the responsible adoption of AI across the engineering org from AI-assisted development workflows (code generation, review, testing) to evaluating where LLMs and agentic systems can meaningfully improve our product and internal tooling
• Define aspirational goals for the operational state of the overall architecture, and enable teams to create and evolve architectures independently
• Spot opportunities and bottlenecks in architecture and team structures, and drive best practices across the organisation
• Dive deep into code when it matters debugging, reviewing critical paths, unblocking engineers on hard problems while maintaining high standards for system design, performance, observability, and reliability across a fintech-grade platform handling sensitive financial data.

Execution & Influence

• Establish the team structures, communication channels, tracking, and accountability mechanisms that bring predictability to execution across the organisation.
• Identify large risks and opportunities, unlock customer value, and influence other teams to collaborate with yours to solve for them.
• Demonstrate high judgement on high-cost, high-risk decisions, finding two-way-door approaches that let the organisation innovate and move forward.
• Drive strategic communication between senior leadership across the organisation irrespective of team or function boundaries and lead external communication with partners, vendors, and beyond.
• Consistently reduce the cost and effort spent on products and business areas already built and in operation
• Bring a data-driven lens to engineering decisions, using AI-powered tooling to increase team velocity and code quality without compromising rigor.
• Partner closely with product managers to shape problem statements, not just execute solutions, ensuring engineering output translates directly into business outcomes and a better client experience.

What We're Looking For

• 12+ years of total software engineering experience, with 5+ years managing teams of 20+ engineers spanning multiple teams led by multiple engineering managers.
• A track record of leading independently in ambiguous business and technology domains, owning strategic direction across an entire business not a single product.
• Demonstrated ability to grow senior engineers into principal-level talent and to develop other engineering managers.
• Strong technical depth in one or more of: distributed systems, backend architectures, API design, data infrastructure with the ability to simplify and evolve architecture across multiple systems for scale, performance, and reduced maintenance
• Proven high judgement on high-cost, high-risk decisions, including buy vs. build vs. outsource trade-offs and decisions on the future of products and architectures.
• Hands-on experience integrating AI/LLM-based tools into engineering workflows or product surfaces you understand both the potential and the limits
• Experience shipping products at scale in fast-paced, high-growth tech organizations (fintech preferred).
• Strong communication skills and the ability to align and influence cross- functional stakeholders including founders, department heads, and external partners.
• A builder's mindset pragmatic, comfortable with complete ambiguity, and genuinely curious about where new - age tech is headed in software engineering.
• Shape the technology behind an industry-defining investing platform, at a stage where your architectural and AI adoption decisions will compound.
• Own the strategic direction of an entire business with real autonomy to decide the future of major products and architectures.
• Work alongside an ambitious, high-calibre engineering, product, and design team and directly with founders who've built and scaled before.
• A fast-paced, learning-driven culture that rewards initiative, technical excellence, and genuine curiosity about what's next.