Associate Director - Engineering

About the job

About us:

At Cashfree Payments, we're not just shaping the future of payments - we're moving fast to scale businesses at every stage, with deep expertise in powering India's D2C and e-commerce growth.

Founded in 2015, we process transactions worth $80B annually and are trusted by more than 800,000 businesses.

Authorised by the Reserve Bank of India, we are one of the first entities to receive critical licences like PA-PG, PA-CB and PPI in the sector.

We enable seamless collections, payouts, identity verification, and fraud detection.

We are backed by Silicon Valley investor Y Combinator, Apis Partners, Krafton Inc, State Bank of India (SBI), and were incubated by PayPal.

Associate Director - Engineering (12+ Years Experience)

Role Overview:

As an Associate Director of Engineering, you will drive technology vision, execution excellence, and organizational 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.

Key Responsibilities:

1. Technology Strategy & Architecture:

- Define and own the technology roadmap for multiple products or platforms within the business unit, ensuring alignment with the organization'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.

2. Execution & Delivery Excellence:

- Oversee end-to-end product delivery, ensuring high-quality releases within defined timelines.

- Establish and optimize engineering processes, development standards, and best practices to improve productivity and predictability.

- Drive data-informed decision-making using engineering metrics (velocity, quality, reliability, cost).

3. Leadership & 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.

4. 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.

Core 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.

Experience & Qualifications:

- 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