Engineering Director

Bounteous; Chennai District; On-site; INR 6,000,000 - 9,000,000; Full time

Job summary

Bounteous in Chennai seeks an Engineering Director to lead strategic delivery and ensure engineering health across client accounts. This senior role owns end-to-end accountability for delivery and champions AI‑driven practices, engaging credibly with client leadership.

It is not hands-on coding, but governance, planning, and cross‑functional leadership are central. The role focuses on ownership, capacity planning, and governance, leading 50+ engineers and professionals with commercial

Qualifications

• 14+ years in software engineering or technical delivery leadership.
• 5+ years at Director level or equivalent.
• Proven ownership of delivery outcomes and engineering quality.
• Experience managing 50+ engineers/delivery professionals.
• Commercial/forecasting accountability for engineering delivery.

Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end delivery accountability for the account: deliverables, estimation, sprint health, resource planning.
• Maintain engineering governance: performance, stability, observability, DORA metrics.
• Drive AI-enabled SDLC adoption and AI-based client solutions.
• Lead 50+ engineers and delivery professionals; performance management and development.
• Executive reporting to Bounteous and client leadership on delivery and financials.

Skills

Program Management

Job description

14 to 18 years of experience
Skills: Program Management

Role Summary

The Engineering Director is a senior technical delivery leadership role responsible for both the operational health of client delivery and the engineering rigor behind it. This role owns end-to-end delivery accountability for the assigned account while also holding the engineering organization to a measurable standard — performance, stability, observability, and AI-driven engineering practice — functioning as the single accountable point of contact for both delivery execution and technical health.

This is not a hands‑on architect or individual‑contributor engineering role. Deep architecture and code‑level ownership remain with existing technical leads. The Engineering Director's value is in ownership, accountability, governance, and the technical fluency to engage credibly with client engineering leadership — not in writing code.

Key Responsibilities

Delivery Leadership

• Own end-to-end delivery accountability for the account: project deliverables, estimation, sprint and backlog health, resource planning.
• Act as the checkpoint between new initiative requests and actual delivery capacity — ensuring no initiative converts from strategic discussion to a committed deadline without an accompanying resourcing and risk plan.
• Own SOW and scope‑change tracking; enforce change‑management discipline across active workstreams.
• Serve as the primary escalation point for delivery‑level risk, coordinating across workstream leads rather than resolving everything personally.

Engineering Rigor & Technical Governance

• Own and report on application/website performance across the account (Core Web Vitals, page load, transaction latency).
• Own platform stability posture: incident trends, RCA discipline and follow‑through, disaster‑recovery readiness, and closing single‑point‑of‑failure gaps through documented backups and cross‑training.
• Establish and mature monitoring, alerting, and observability standards — component‑level health visibility, not just aggregate dashboards.
• Own DORA metrics tracking and improvement across engineering teams: deployment frequency, lead time for changes, change failure rate, mean time to recovery.
• Drive AI‑enabled SDLC adoption (code‑assist tooling, auto‑investigation, agentic workflows) with a clear, quantified delivered/in‑progress/roadmap narrative.
• Identify and drive AI‑based solutions that solve concrete client business problems (e.g. pricing/promotion validation, process automation), partnering with client stakeholders to shape the roadmap.
• Act as a credible, technically fluent counterpart to client engineering leadership (VP Engineering / CTO‑level) in prioritization, roadmap, and trade‑off conversations.
• Build and maintain a proactive capacity and demand plan for the account — surge planning ahead of known peak periods, and a resourcing model that does not rely on ad hoc fractional allocation.
• Contribute to standardizing engineering governance practices that can extend to additional accounts in the portfolio over time, once justified independently on each account.

People Leadership & Organizational Development

• Manage and develop a team of 50+ engineering and delivery professionals across the account/portfolio, including org structure, shift/location coverage planning, and workforce/hiring plans.
• Own formal performance management for the team: review cycles, promotion recommendations, individual development plans, and retention/attrition management.
• Mentor and grow the next layer of technical and delivery leadership, reducing single‑point‑of‑failure dependency on any one individual.
• Own the interface with third‑party/vendor support teams (e.g. managed‑service or L1/L2 partners) — escalation paths, validation ownership, and reporting expectations.

Commercial & Executive Accountability

• Own delivery accountability for $5M+ of engineering work — forecasting, staffing‑cost management, and utilization/margin health for the account.
• Own executive‑level reporting (QBR‑level) to both Bounteous and client leadership on delivery, engineering health, and financial performance.

Required Qualifications

• 14+ years in software engineering or technical delivery leadership, including 5+ years at Director level or equivalent.
• Demonstrated ownership of both delivery outcomes and engineering/technical quality outcomes — not a pure project‑management background.
• Proven experience managing teams of 50+ engineering/delivery professionals, including formal performance management and career development.
• Demonstrated ownership of $5M+ in engineering delivery value, including commercial/forecasting accountability.
• Working knowledge of modern commerce/cloud platforms, observability tooling (e.g. Datadog, Grafana), CI/CD pipelines, and DORA metrics.
• Experience driving AI‑enabled engineering practices (SDLC tooling, agentic workflows) strongly preferred.
• Excellent client‑facing communication skills; demonstrated ability to operate as a peer‑level partner to client VP/Director‑level engineering stakeholders.
• Experience in retail, e‑commerce, or composable commerce platforms preferred.

I’ve worked at several sized consultancies in my career. To me, Bounteous feels like the perfect mix. It has the influence, reach and opportunity that I feel encompasses a large enterprise. Yet, it’s open, adaptive and individual‑focused, that of which I often resonate with a smaller boutique.