Head of Technology (Backend)

We are looking for a highly accomplished Head of Technology (Backend) to lead and scale large engineering organisations building high-traffic consumer-facing platforms. This leader will be responsible for driving technology strategy, engineering excellence, platform scalability, and high-performing teams while partnering closely with product, data, design, and business stakeholders. The ideal candidate will have deep expertise in Java-based distributed systems, strong people leadership experience, and a proven track record of scaling engineering teams in fast-growing B2C/D2C environments.

Responsibilities:

• Define and execute the long-term backend engineering and platform strategy.
• Lead, mentor, and scale multiple engineering managers and senior engineering teams.
• Drive architecture decisions for highly scalable, resilient, and secure distributed systems.
• Own engineering delivery, operational excellence, and platform reliability.
• Build and foster a culture of innovation, accountability, ownership, and continuous improvement.
• Collaborate with Product, Data Science, Analytics, and Business teams to deliver customer-centric solutions.
• Establish engineering best practices around system design, coding standards, observability, testing, and security.
• Drive cloud modernisation, platform optimisation, and cost efficiency initiatives.
• Champion performance management, succession planning, hiring, and leadership development.
• Ensure high availability and scalability of systems serving millions of users and transactions.
• Manage engineering roadmaps, resource planning, budgeting, and stakeholder communication.

Requirements:

• 18+ years of software engineering experience with strong backend engineering foundations.
• Deep expertise in Java, Spring Boot, microservices architecture, and REST APIs.
• Strong experience building and scaling large-scale distributed systems.
• Expertise in system design, event-driven architecture, messaging systems, and cloud-native applications.
• Experience with Kafka, Redis, Elasticsearch, NoSQL databases, and caching technologies.
• Strong understanding of AWS, GCP, or Azure cloud platforms.
• Experience with containerisation and orchestration technologies such as Docker and Kubernetes.
• Strong knowledge of DevOps, CI/CD, observability, monitoring, and SRE practices.
• Strategic technology leader with strong execution capabilities.
• Hands-on understanding of modern backend architecture and platform engineering.
• Exceptional people leader with proven experience building high-performing engineering organisations.
• Strong business acumen and ability to align technology with business outcomes.
• Passion for innovation, customer experience, and engineering excellence.

Leadership Experience:

• Proven experience leading engineering organisations of 50+ engineers through engineering managers.
• Strong people management and leadership experience with direct ownership of engineering managers.
• Demonstrated success in scaling teams, driving organisational transformation, and building leadership pipelines.
• Experience managing cross-functional stakeholders and executive leadership communication.
• Track record of delivering large-scale business-critical initiatives.

Preferred Background:

• Strong experience in B2C/D2C consumer-facing product companies is mandatory.
• Experience building platforms serving millions of users and handling high transaction volumes.
• Prior experience in e-commerce, marketplaces, travel, food tech, fintech, OTT, consumer internet, or hyperlocal platforms.
• Experience working in high-growth product organisations.
• Bachelor's degree in computer science/engineering from a reputed institute; a master's degree is preferred.