Director Technology

About Affinity

Affinity is pioneering new frontiers in AdTech by building privacy-first advertising infrastructure that helps publishers maximize monetization and enables advertisers to reach the right audiences beyond walled gardens. Operating across 10+markets in Asia, the US, and Europe, with a team of 575+ professionals, Affinity continues to innovate at scale in the global AdTech ecosystem.

Role: Director - Technology (Data & Platforms)

Location: Mumbai (Malad)

Role Overview:

We are looking for a Director - Technology to lead the architecture, development, and scaling of our backend platforms, comprehensive data ecosystem, and AI integration. This role will oversee a polyglot database environment (SQL, NoSQL, and Big Data) and drive the adoption of AI/ML technologies to enhance our AdTech infrastructure.

Key Responsibilities:

Data & Database Leadership

• Polyglot Persistence: Lead the strategy for a diverse database landscape, ensuring the right tool for the job

across MySQL (Relational), Hadoop (Big Data), MongoDB (NoSQL), and cloud-native solutions like Snowflake or BigQuery.

• Data Lifecycle Management: Own the end-to-end data journey-from high-velocity ingestion via Kafka to long- term storage in data lakes and real-time retrieval for backend services.

AI & Innovation

• AI Roadmap: Define and execute the strategy for integrating Modern AI/ML (e.g., LLMs, Predictive Modelling) into backend services to optimize ad targeting and platform efficiency.
• Vector Databases: Evaluate and implement vector databases (e.g., Pinecone, Milvus, or Weaviate) to support AI- driven search and recommendation engines.

Leadership & Team Management

• Lead, mentor, and scale backend and data engineering teams.
• Drive engineering best practices, coding standards, and architectural reviews.
• Partner with Product, Data, and Business teams to translate requirements into scalable technical solutions.
• Play a key role in hiring senior engineers and technical leaders.

Platform & Cloud Operations

• Drive cloud-first architecture and cost-efficient infrastructure design.
• Ensure high availability, fault tolerance, and disaster recovery across backend services.
• Oversee CI/CD pipelines, monitoring, and observability for backend systems.

Strategic Contribution

• Contribute to long-term technology roadmap and platform evolution.
• Evaluate and introduce new backend and data technologies aligned with business growth.
• Act as a senior technical voice in leadership discussions and decision-making.

Required Skills:

• 12-15+ years of software engineering experience
• 5+ years in Engineering Manager / Senior Manager / Directorroles
• Deep experience with MySQL / PostgreSQL / MongoDB or other NoSQL technologies
• Hands-on experience managing and scaling Hadoop clusters and distributed processing frameworks (Spark/Flink).
• Proficiency in AWS (RDS, Aurora, DynamoDB, Redshift), GCP (Cloud SQL, Spanner, Bigtable, BigQuery)
• Hands-on experience with Kafka (producers, consumers, streams, scaling).
• Proficiency in Python and shell scripting for automation, backend logic, and data manipulation.
• Experience in implementing Modern AI technologies, including Natural Language Processing (NLP), Generative AI frameworks, or predictive analytics.
• Ability to use data visualization tools (e.g., Tableau, Looker, Metabase, Apache Superset etc )