Application Development SME

• DIGITAL CHANNELS Engineering Leader NPCI Website and Content Platform 1. The Opportunity NPCI is looking for an accomplished Engineering Manager to lead the engineering of its public-facing website and associated content-management platform. The website handles approximately 60 lakh requests per month and experiences substantially higher demand during important announcements, campaigns, and ecosystem events. It therefore requires high availability, strong security, predictable performance, accessibility, effective observability, and readiness for sudden traffic peaks. This role offers the opportunity to shape and operate a high-visibility digital platform in India’s payments ecosystem. The Engineering Manager will lead a cross-functional team responsible for frontend, backend, content-management, quality engineering, release readiness, and production support. The technology landscape primarily includes Node.js, React.js, Express.js, Strapi, Kubernetes, OpenTelemetry, caching, databases, CDN and reverse-proxy integration, and secure CI/CD practices. The position combines people leadership, technical direction, delivery governance, stakeholder management, and production accountability. It is not a purely administrative role. The incumbent must remain technically credible, guide architecture and engineering decisions, review material risks, mentor engineers, and lead the team through complex releases and production incidents. 2. Job Details Job Title Engineering Manager - NPCI Website and Content Platform Function Technology / Application Engineering Experience 10-14 years of software-engineering experience, including 3-5 years in technical leadership, engineering management, or an equivalent role Location Hyderabad / As per NPCI policy

Employment Type Full-time Role Type Engineering leadership, people management, technical governance, delivery ownership, and production accountability Team Scope Cross-functional full-stack engineering team covering frontend, backend, CMS, testing, observability, release readiness, and application production support Technology Context Node.js, React.js, Express.js, Strapi, JavaScript/TypeScript, REST APIs, Kubernetes, Docker, OpenTelemetry, databases, distributed caching, CI/CD, CDN and security controls 3. Key Skills and

Experience Required Leadership and Management

• Proven experience leading, coaching, and developing engineering teams responsible for business-critical or high-traffic digital platforms.
• Strong people-management capabilities covering goal setting, performance management, career development, feedback, hiring, onboarding, workforce planning, succession, and retention.
• Ability to develop technical leads and senior engineers, delegate ownership, resolve team impediments, and reduce key-person dependencies.
• Demonstrated stakeholder-management, prioritization, negotiation, risk-management, vendor-management, and executive-communication skills.
• Ability to balance delivery timelines with security, reliability, maintainability, compliance, and total cost of ownership. Technical and Engineering
• Strong engineering foundation in Node.js, React.js, Express.js, Strapi or comparable headless CMS platforms, JavaScript ES6+, and TypeScript.
• Sound understanding of Node.js runtime behaviour, asynchronous programming, event-loop performance, streams, worker threads, memory management, error handling, connection pooling, and application lifecycle management.
• Experience governing REST API design, validation, authentication, authorization, structured logging, caching, rate limiting, timeouts, retries, secure headers, API documentation, and automated testing.
• Practical experience with Docker, Kubernetes-based application delivery, CI/CD pipelines, relational or document databases, Redis or equivalent distributed caching, and Linux production environments.
• Experience designing or operating highly available public-facing applications, including capacity planning, load and endurance testing, peak-event readiness, graceful degradation, disaster recovery, incident response, and root-cause analysis.
• Practical knowledge of OpenTelemetry or equivalent observability approaches covering distributed traces, metrics, structured-log correlation, dashboards, alerts, context propagation, and telemetry controls.
• Strong understanding of application security, OWASP-aligned secure engineering, secrets management, dependency governance, vulnerability remediation, and SAST, DAST, software-composition and container-scanning controls.
• Ability to review architecture, non-functional requirements, code, test strategy, Kubernetes configuration, and production-readiness evidence at an appropriate depth without becoming a delivery bottleneck. Qualifications and Preferred Experience
• Bachelor’s or master’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or a related discipline.
• Experience in banking, payments, financial services, or another regulated and security-sensitive domain is preferred.
• Experience with CDN, Web Application Firewall, API gateway, reverse proxy, object storage, enterprise identity, SEO, Core Web Vitals, accessibility, and structured metadata is advantageous.
• Exposure to blue-green, canary, or rolling deployments; performance tools such as k6, JMeter, or Gatling; and platforms such as SonarQube or equivalent security and quality tooling is preferred.
• Agile, project-management, cloud-native, security, or architecture certifications are advantageous but not mandatory. 4. Accountabilities with Major Activities A. People and Engineering Leadership
• Build, lead, coach, and retain a capable cross-functional engineering team.
• Set clear individual and team goals, ownership boundaries, engineering expectations, and measurable outcomes.
• Conduct regular one-to-one discussions, performance reviews, career planning, feedback, recognition, and development interventions.
• Plan team capacity and skills, participate in hiring and onboarding, develop succession coverage, and address performance or capability gaps.
• Create a culture of accountability, technical excellence, secure engineering, collaboration, continuous learning, and blameless improvement. B. Technical Strategy and Architecture Governance
• Own the technical direction and modernization roadmap for the website and content platform.
• Guide architecture across Node.js, React.js, Express.js, Strapi, APIs, databases, caching, object storage, CDN, reverse proxy, Web Application Firewall, Kubernetes, and observability components.
• Approve material solution designs, non-functional requirements, technology selections, API contracts, failure-handling approaches, and major framework or platform upgrades.
• Ensure solutions are modular, secure, accessible, maintainable, testable, horizontally scalable, operationally supportable, and aligned with NPCI technology standards.
• Maintain architecture documentation, technical-decision records, reusable patterns, and engineering guardrails. C. Delivery and Release Accountability
• Translate business, communications, marketing, regulatory, security, and operational needs into prioritized engineering plans and delivery milestones.
• Own delivery predictability across discovery, estimation, design, development, testing, security review, deployment readiness, release, and post-production validation.
• Manage scope, dependencies, capacity, technical debt, delivery risks, and cross-team impediments, with timely escalation and mitigation.
• Coordinate high-visibility content launches, planned releases, platform upgrades, migrations, and remediation programmes.
• Ensure release evidence, approvals, rollback procedures, operational documentation, and production validation are complete. D. High-Traffic Performance and Reliability
• Ensure the platform is engineered for approximately 60 lakh monthly requests and materially higher peak traffic, concurrency, and failure scenarios.
• Define and govern targets for availability, latency, throughput, scalability, accessibility, recoverability, and graceful degradation.
• Drive stateless design, horizontal scaling, server-side and client-side caching, CDN utilization, compression, asset optimization, efficient APIs, database performance, pagination, controlled payloads, and connection management.
• Ensure appropriate timeout, retry, circuit-breaking, rate-limiting, back-pressure, bulkheading, and graceful startup and shutdown strategies.
• Sponsor load, stress, spike, endurance, capacity, failover, and recovery testing; ensure identified bottlenecks and resilience gaps are resolved. E. Security, Risk, and Compliance
• Be accountable for secure engineering practices appropriate for a high-visibility public website in the financial ecosystem.
• Embed threat modelling, secure design, peer review, dependency controls, secrets management, vulnerability remediation, auditability, and security testing into the delivery lifecycle.
• Ensure mitigation of web, API, CMS, file-upload, access-control, injection, cross-site scripting, request-forgery, server-side request forgery, path-traversal, sensitive-data exposure, and supply-chain risks.
• Own timely remediation of SAST, DAST, software-composition analysis, container-scanning, penetration-testing, audit, and security-review findings.
• Maintain controlled currency and upgrade plans for Node.js, React.js, Express.js, Strapi, container images, and third-party dependencies. F. Observability, Production Support, and Continual Improvement
• Define an OpenTelemetry-based observability approach using traces, metrics, and correlated structured logs across browser, APIs, CMS, databases, caches, and external dependencies.
• Establish service indicators, objectives, dashboards, and actionable alerts for traffic, errors, latency, saturation, dependency health, event-loop delay, memory, API, and database performance.
• Ensure telemetry is useful, appropriately sampled, cost-conscious, and does not disclose sensitive information.
• Lead engineering response for priority incidents, support clear stakeholder communication, and drive evidence-based service restoration.
• Chair root-cause reviews and ensure corrective and preventive actions are assigned, prioritized, and completed.
• Use trends in incidents, escaped defects, vulnerabilities, change failures, recovery time, operational toil, and technical debt to guide engineering improvements. G. Quality Engineering and DevSecOps
• Define standards for unit, component, integration, API, contract, security, performance, accessibility, and end-to-end testing.
• Enforce pragmatic quality gates covering code review, automated tests, static analysis, dependency controls, security checks, container checks, and release approvals.
• Improve CI/CD automation, environment consistency, deployment traceability, release safety, and rollback capability with DevOps and platform teams.
• Govern application readiness for Kubernetes, including probes, resource requests and limits, autoscaling, rolling updates, configuration, secrets, lifecycle handling, and diagnosis of application-level container issues.
• Ensure technical documentation, API specifications, deployment guides, release notes, operational runbooks, and recovery procedures are current. H. Stakeholder, Partner, and Vendor Management
• Act as the primary engineering interface for business owners, Corporate Communications, Technology, Information Security, Infrastructure, Network, Operations, Governance, and enterprise architecture teams.
• Communicate technical choices, trade-offs, delivery status, operational risks, incidents, and investment requirements clearly to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Manage external partners where applicable, including deliverables, engineering quality, access, security, documentation, knowledge transfer, and compliance with NPCI standards.
• Provide inputs to budgeting, capacity planning, licensing, support contracts, sourcing, and platform-modernization decisions.

• Ensure NPCI retains ownership of critical code, knowledge, credentials, documentation, operational procedures, and architectural decisions. Role Boundary The Engineering Manager owns application engineering, team leadership, delivery governance, and production-engineering outcomes for the website platform. Enterprise Infrastructure, Network, Kubernetes platform, Database Administration, and Information Security teams may own their respective platforms and controls. The Engineering Manager must partner with these teams and ensure that application design, configuration, deployment artefacts, operational readiness, and remediation actions meet applicable NPCI standards.