Engineering Director

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

Job summary

Bounteous is seeking an Engineering Director to lead and govern end-to-end client delivery with a focus on engineering rigor, performance, and AI-enabled practices. This role partners with client engineering leadership to shape roadmaps and ensure delivery quality, governance, and scalable capacity.

The position drives DORA metrics, platform stability, and AI-driven SDLC adoption while senior leadership engages with client stakeholders on outcomes and budgets.

Qualifications

• 14+ years in software engineering or technical delivery leadership.
• 5+ years at Director level or equivalent.
• Proven experience managing teams of 50+ engineering/delivery professionals.
• Ownership of $5M+ in engineering delivery value, including forecasting.
• Working knowledge of modern commerce/cloud platforms, observability tooling, CI/CD, and DORA metrics.
• Experience driving AI-enabled engineering practices (SDLC tooling, agentic workflows).
• Excellent client-facing communication skills; able to engage with VP/Director-level stakeholders.
• Experience in retail, e-commerce, or composable commerce platforms.

Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end delivery accountability for the account: deliverables, estimation, sprint/backlog health, resource planning.
• Act as the checkpoint between initiatives and delivery capacity with risk and resourcing plans.
• Own SOW and scope-change tracking; enforce change management across workstreams.
• Own application/website performance and platform stability posture; drive incident RCA and disaster-recovery readiness.
• Establish and mature monitoring, alerting, and observability standards; track DORA metrics.
• Drive AI-enabled SDLC adoption with toolchains and workflow improvements.
• Lead client discussions at VP/Director level on prioritization, roadmap, and trade-offs.
• Manage and develop a 50+ person engineering/delivery team; performance management and growth.

Skills

Delivery leadership

Observability

AI-enabled SDLC

Client-facing communication

Cloud platforms

DORA metrics

Stakeholder management

Tools

Datadog

Grafana

Job description

Job Description

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.

Client & Portfolio Leadership

• 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.