Senior Director - Backend

We are looking for an accomplished Senior Director - Backend to lead large-scale backend engineering organisations, define technology strategy, and drive the development of mission-critical platforms. The ideal candidate is a visionary engineering leader with deep expertise in Java and modern backend architectures, coupled with a proven track record of leading multiple engineering teams and delivering enterprise-scale products.

Responsibilities:

• Define and execute the long-term backend engineering strategy aligned with business and technology objectives.
• Lead and mentor multiple engineering managers, architects, and senior technical leaders across backend teams.
• Drive the design and delivery of highly scalable, secure, resilient, and cloud-native backend platforms.
• Establish engineering excellence through architecture governance, coding standards, quality practices, and operational excellence.
• Partner closely with Product, Architecture, Security, Infrastructure, Data, and Business stakeholders to deliver strategic initiatives.
• Drive modernisation initiatives including microservices transformation, API-first architecture, cloud adoption, and platform engineering.
• Own engineering planning, budgeting, hiring strategy, resource allocation, and organisational scaling.
• Champion DevSecOps, CI/CD, observability, automation, and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) practices.
• Ensure systems meet enterprise requirements for performance, availability, scalability, compliance, and security.
• Foster a culture of innovation, technical excellence, continuous learning, and customer-centric engineering.
• Influence enterprise-wide technology decisions and contribute to organisational digital transformation.

Leadership Expectations:

• Build and scale high-performing engineering organisations.
• Mentor engineering managers, architects, and senior technical leaders.
• Drive engineering culture focused on innovation, ownership, accountability, and execution excellence.
• Influence executive stakeholders and represent engineering leadership across strategic initiatives.
• Lead organisational transformation and continuous technology modernisation.
• Establish engineering KPIs, operational metrics, and delivery governance.
• Drive talent acquisition, succession planning, and leadership development.

Requirements:

• 18-22 years of software engineering experience with significant leadership experience managing large engineering organisations.
• Strong hands-on expertise in Java (Mandatory) with deep understanding of enterprise backend development.
• Expertise in Spring Boot, Spring Framework, and enterprise Java ecosystem.
• Extensive experience designing Microservices Architecture.
• Strong experience with RESTful APIs, API Gateway, API lifecycle management, and event-driven architectures.
• Expertise in distributed systems, scalable backend platforms, and high-availability architectures.
• Strong knowledge of multithreading, concurrency, JVM performance tuning, and system optimisation.
• Experience with cloud platforms such as Google Cloud Platform (Preferred), AWS, or Azure.
• Experience with Kubernetes, Docker, container orchestration, and cloud-native application development.
• Strong understanding of CI/CD pipelines, DevOps practices, Infrastructure as Code, and automation.
• Experience with Kafka or similar messaging/event streaming platforms.
• Strong expertise in database design across SQL and NoSQL technologies.
• Excellent understanding of security best practices including OAuth2 JWT, authentication, authorisation, encryption, and secure API development.
• Experience leading globally distributed engineering teams.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience in telecom, digital platforms, SaaS, or large-scale enterprise product organisations.
• Exposure to platform engineering and developer experience initiatives.
• Experience with AI-assisted software engineering and engineering productivity tools.
• Familiarity with Domain-Driven Design (DDD), Event Sourcing, and CQRS.
• Experience managing engineering organisations comprising 100+ engineers through multiple leadership layers.
• Strong business acumen with experience collaborating directly with executive leadership.

Education:

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or a related discipline.
• MBA or Executive Leadership programs would be an added advantage.