Associate Director - Engineering

As an Associate Director of Engineering, you will drive technology vision, execution excellence, and organisational capability for a business unit. You will operate at the intersection of strategy and delivery, shaping architecture, scaling teams, and ensuring high-quality product outcomes aligned with business goals.

The candidate will have responsibilities across the following functions:

Technology Strategy and Architecture:

• Define and own the technology roadmap for multiple products or platforms within the business unit, ensuring alignment with the organisation's long-term technology vision.
• Govern architectural decisions across systems, ensuring scalability, reliability, security, and cost efficiency.
• Evaluate and introduce emerging technologies to drive innovation and competitive advantage.

Execution and Delivery Excellence:

• Oversee end-to-end product delivery, ensuring high-quality releases within defined timelines.
• Establish and optimise engineering processes, development standards, and best practices to improve productivity and predictability.
• Drive data-informed decision-making using engineering metrics (velocity, quality, reliability, cost).

Leadership and Talent Development:

• Build, lead, and scale high-performing engineering teams, including Engineering Managers and senior technical leaders.
• Identify skill gaps and implement structured learning, upskilling, and leadership development programs.
• Mentor Engineering Managers and senior engineers to enhance technical depth and leadership capability.

Cross-functional Collaboration:

• Partner with Product, QA, UX, Operations, and Business stakeholders to ensure effective planning, staffing, and execution of initiatives.
• Communicate technical strategy and trade-offs clearly to executive and non-technical stakeholders.
• Align engineering priorities with business outcomes, customer needs, and operational goals.

Requirements:

• Strong expertise in designing and scaling distributed systems, microservices architectures, and event-driven systems.
• Deep experience with Java ecosystem (e. g., Spring Boot, Hibernate, JPA) and modern backend development practices.
• Solid understanding of data architectures, including relational databases and NoSQL/document stores.
• Proven ability in object-oriented design, system design, and architectural patterns.
• Good understanding of web and mobile technology stacks.
• Strong grasp of non-functional requirements and the ability to make pragmatic trade-offs.
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines, DevOps practices, and automated testing frameworks.
• Hands-on familiarity with agile methodologies and modern software development practices.
• Experience managing and operating large-scale production systems.
• 12+ years of experience in software engineering, with a significant portion in leadership roles managing teams and large-scale systems.
• Proven track record of delivering complex software products from inception to launch and scaling them in production.
• Experience leading multiple teams or large engineering groups in a fast-paced environment.
• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or a related field.