Development Manager

About the Company:

Our client is a global AI services, consulting, and product engineering firm founded by experienced leaders from renowned organizations such as BCG, KPMG, RBS, and Microsoft. The company combines deep industry expertise with emerging technologies to build innovative, scalable, and future-ready digital solutions.

The company serves diverse industries including Banking & Financial Services, Hi-Tech, Consulting, Non-Profits, Retail & eCommerce, and Consumer Goods. Its expertise spans Generative AI, Machine Learning, Mobile, Web, and SaaS, helping organizations modernize operations, enhance customer experiences, and drive sustainable business growth.

Role Overview:

We are looking for a Development Manager with a strong software engineering background who can lead development teams, drive technical solutioning, and work closely with clients and stakeholders to deliver high-quality digital and AI-powered products.

This role is ideal for an engineering professional who has grown from a developer/engineer into a technical leadership role and can combine strong technical depth with team leadership, client management, and delivery ownership.

The ideal candidate should be comfortable understanding complex business requirements, evaluating technology choices, guiding architecture and solution design, mentoring developers, resolving technical challenges, and ensuring successful execution across multiple projects.

Key Responsibilities:

• Lead and manage software development teams across backend, frontend, QA and other technical functions.
• Provide technical direction and guidance to engineers, Tech Leads and development teams.
• Understand business and client requirements and translate them into scalable and practical technical solutions.
• Drive solution design, system architecture, technology selection, API design, integrations and technical implementation.
• Review technical designs and participate in architecture and solution discussions with internal teams and clients.
• Conduct and drive code reviews, engineering best practices, coding standards and development quality.
• Identify technical risks, dependencies and challenges early and work with teams to resolve them effectively.
• Mentor and develop engineers and Tech Leads, helping build strong technical capability within the team.
• Work closely with Product, Business, QA, DevOps and other stakeholders to ensure smooth engineering execution.
• Engage directly with clients and stakeholders to understand requirements, explain technical approaches and provide solutions to complex problems.
• Provide technical estimates, resource requirements and delivery inputs for new projects and engagements.
• Own engineering execution across projects, balancing technical quality, timelines, priorities and client expectations.
• Stay abreast of emerging technologies and evaluate their applicability to company's products and client solutions.
• Work closely with AI/ML teams on Gen AI, LLM, RAG, Agentic AI, automation and AI-powered product development initiatives.
• Drive continuous improvement in engineering processes, productivity, quality and delivery practices.

Must-Have Skills & Experience:

• 10+ years of overall experience in software development / engineering.
• Strong career progression from Software Developer/Engineer → Senior Developer → Tech Lead/Technical Lead → Development/Engineering Manager or equivalent.
• Mandatory experience in IT Services / Software Services organisations.
• Strong understanding of software development, backend technologies, APIs, databases, system architecture and integrations.
• Proven experience managing and mentoring software development teams.
• Strong experience in technical solutioning, architecture discussions, system design and technical decision-making.
• Experience conducting code reviews and driving engineering standards and best practices.
• Strong client-facing and stakeholder management skills with the ability to communicate technical concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Ability to independently analyse a problem, propose multiple technical approaches and recommend the most appropriate solution.
• Experience working across Agile/Scrum development environments.
• Strong understanding of cloud, DevOps, CI/CD, APIs, databases and modern software engineering practices.
• Exposure to Generative AI / LLMs / RAG / AI Agents and experience working with AI-powered solutions.
• Strong communication, problem-solving and decision-making skills.

Preferred Experience:

• Experience working with Gen AI, LLMs, RAG, Agentic AI or AI-powered applications.
• Experience with Claude, OpenAI or other enterprise LLM platforms.
• Exposure to cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure or GCP.
• Experience with Docker, Kubernetes and CI/CD pipelines.
• Experience working with microservices, distributed systems and scalable enterprise applications.
• Experience handling multiple projects/clients in a services or consulting environment.
• Experience in solution consulting, technical pre-sales or participating in client solution discussions.
• Experience managing geographically distributed or cross-functional engineering teams.