Head - Engineering

Pepperfry Limited; Mumbai; On-site; INR 4,000,000 - 8,000,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Leadership role on leadership team

Job summary

Pepperfry Limited is seeking a Head of Engineering to rearchitect our AI-centric platform while keeping the live commerce engine stable. The role demands strong ownership of technology strategy, architecture, and budget with a track record of delivering at consumer scale.

You will guide teams across web, apps, and studios to ship reliable, secure features. You will lead AI-enabled development and drive cost-aware cloud optimization, guiding the team through a clear roadmap and prioritising

Qualifications

• Proven at consumer-scale engineering leadership
• Ability to own technology strategy and budget
• Experience leading large platform migrations
• Practical about AI and production deployment
• Strong communication to CEO and board

Responsibilities

• Own the engineering roadmap with business leaders: what gets built, in what order, and when it ships.
• Modernise our customer and commerce platforms in steps the business can absorb, not through a big-bang rewrite.
• Build the systems that let our website, apps and studios work as one store.
• Make AI a default part of how the team writes, tests, reviews and ships code, and measure what it changes.
• Build AI into the product where it earns its place, from discovery to assisted buying.
• Own reliability, performance and security, especially through sale peaks.
• Treat tech debt and cloud spend as budgets you plan and pay down, not surprises you explain later.
• Hire, grow and keep a strong bench of engineering managers and tech leads, with a clear career ladder.

Job description

THE ROLE

For more than a decade, Pepperfry has built the platform Indians use to furnish their homes. We are hiring a Head of Engineering to rebuild how we engineer around AI, and to keep that platform running while we do it. Think of it as renovating a house while the family still lives in it. The lights stay on and every room gets better.

YOU WILL

• Own the engineering roadmap with business leaders: what gets built, in what order, and when it ships. Keep the CTO and leadership team clear on status and risk.
• Modernise our customer and commerce platforms in steps the business can absorb, not through a big-bang rewrite.
• Build the systems that let our website, apps and studios work as one store.
• Make AI a default part of how the team writes, tests, reviews and ships code, and measure what it changes.
• Build AI into the product where it earns its place, from discovery to assisted buying.
• Own reliability, performance and security, especially through sale peaks, when every minute of downtime has a price.
• Treat tech debt and cloud spend as budgets you plan and pay down, not surprises you explain later.
• Hire, grow and keep a strong bench of engineering managers and tech leads, with a clear career ladder.

YOUR FIRST YEAR

• 90 days: You know the teams, the systems and where the platform breaks. The CTO has signed off on your written plan, and every team ships against one shared roadmap.
• 6 months: You run the technology plan, architecture, vendors and budget, and you have taken it to the leadership table. AI-assisted development is standard practice, and the first AI feature you sponsored is live with customers.
• 12 months: The platform is faster, cheaper to run and safer to change, and it held its targets through peak sale season. Your leadership team is in place, and the engineers you hired are referring their friends.

YOU ARE

• Proven at consumer scale. You have run engineering for a high-traffic consumer or e-commerce business and carried the pager through peak.
• An owner. You have owned technology strategy, architecture and budget, and you make build, buy and fix calls you can explain on one page.
• A finisher. You have led a large platform migration to completion, not just started one.
• Practical about AI. You have shipped AI features to real users, and you know where models fail.
• Still technical. You know modern web, mobile and cloud stacks well enough to read code and find the risk in a design doc.
• A leader of leaders. You have hired and grown engineering managers, and people join your teams and stay.
• A clear communicator. You can explain technology to the CEO, the board and business leaders, and your documents settle debates instead of starting them.

GOOD TO HAVE

• E-commerce or marketplace experience.
• Search and discovery at catalogue scale.
• Omnichannel retail systems that connect stores, inventory and online orders.
• Supply chain or logistics technology.
• LLMs in production, with hands-on work on evaluation, cost and latency.

ASSOCIATED BEHAVIOURS

• You raise the bar for user centricity and intellect across Pepperfry.
• You do your best work in a high-visibility, fast-moving environment.
• You decide with data, and you push for automation inside your team and beyond it.
• You act before you are asked, and hard problems do not slow you down.
• You build strong working relationships across a matrix organisation.

WHAT WE OFFER

• The chance to lead engineering at Indias largest omnichannel home marketplace, while we rebuild its platform.
• A seat on the leadership team.