Head - Engineering

What You'll Do:

- Own the engineering strategy and roadmap for the Lifestyle Protection business line, aligning technical priorities with product and business goals.

- Build and lead a high-performing engineering organization - hiring, mentoring, and structuring teams across backend, platform, data, and integrations.

- Architect a scalable, partner-agnostic integration platform that supports embedding protection products into lending, payments, HRMS/payroll, and wealth-tech partner journeys via APIs and event-driven flows.

- Own core systems for eligibility, underwriting rules, policy issuance, claims processing, and renewals - designed for configurability across partners rather than one-off builds.

- Define and own the data infrastructure strategy - data pipelines, event streaming, data warehousing/lakes, and the infrastructure needed for risk scoring, underwriting models, and partner reporting.

- Partner closely with Product, Actuarial/Underwriting, Compliance, and Design to translate business requirements into resilient, scalable systems.

- Set and enforce engineering standards for code quality, testing, CI/CD, observability, and on-call practices.

- Own security, compliance, and data privacy for systems handling sensitive financial, health, and KYC data, in line with US regulatory requirements (e.g., state insurance regulations, SOC 2, HIPAA where applicable).

- Drive platform reliability and performance - defining SLAs/SLOs with partners and ensuring systems scale with partner and transaction volume growth.

- Manage engineering budget, vendor/tooling decisions, and build-vs-buy tradeoffs in partnership with the CTO and finance.

- Represent engineering in partner and customer conversations, particularly for technical integration discussions with lending, payments, HRMS, and wealth-tech partners.

What We're Looking For:

Leadership Experience:

- 8+ years in software engineering, with 5+ years in engineering leadership roles (Head of Engineering, VP Engineering, Director of Engineering, or equivalent).

- Track record of building and scaling engineering teams from the ground up, ideally within a fast-growing fintech, insurtech, or embedded finance business.

- Experience operating in a Indian regulatory and market environment for financial services or insurance products.

Domain & Technical Depth:

- Strong understanding of insurance/protection product systems - underwriting, rating/pricing engines, policy administration, and claims workflows.

- Experience architecting B2B2C or embedded/platform systems - i.e., systems that plug into multiple partner ecosystems (lending, payments, HRMS/payroll, wealth-tech) via APIs and webhooks.

- Deep familiarity with data infrastructure - data pipelines, event streaming (Kafka or similar), data warehousing/lakes, and building infra to support real-time risk scoring and personalization.

- Solid grasp of distributed systems, API design, microservices architecture, and cloud infrastructure (AWS/GCP/Azure).

- Strong understanding of security, data privacy, and compliance requirements for handling sensitive financial and health data (PII, KYC, encryption, SOC 2, HIPAA).

Execution & Collaboration:

- Proven ability to balance hands-on technical leadership with strategic planning and stakeholder management.

- Experience managing complex, multi-partner technical integrations and negotiating technical requirements with external partner engineering teams.

- Excellent communication skills - able to work closely with Product, Actuarial, Compliance, and executive leadership.

- Comfortable operating in a fast-paced, scaling environment with evolving priorities.

Nice to Have:

- Prior experience in an insurtech, embedded insurance, or protection products company.

- Experience building rules engines or configuration platforms that allow rapid partner-specific customization.

- Exposure to actuarial/underwriting systems or working closely with actuarial teams.