Sr. Director – AI & Software Engineering
India |Data, Analytics & AI | Full-time| Hands-on technical leadership
Location - Bengaluru/Gurgaon/Noida/Pune/Mumbai/Chennai/Hyderabad
Straive is seeking a hands-on technology leader to serve as the senior technical authority for our AI, analytics, and software engineering solutions.
About the Role:
You will set technical direction, resolve complex engineering challenges, and move solutions from prototype to secure, scalable production. The role combines architecture and execution leadership including a mandate to improve enterprise AI economics through fit-for-purpose frontier, open-source, and smaller models.
This is not a conventional delivery-governance role. You will remain close to the technology, lead critical design and code reviews, mentor teams, and take accountability for high-stakes technical outcomes.
Key Responsibilities
1. Production-Grade Engineering
- Own engineering standards across architecture, development, testing, deployment, security, observability, and documentation.
- Ensure prototypes have a credible production path; introduce architecture and code reviews, automated testing, quality gates, and release-readiness checks.
- Close gaps in scalability, performance, reliability, maintainability, and security from design through deployment.
2. AI Architecture and Economics
- Define scalable, reliable, and cost-effective AI/GenAI architectures based on accuracy, cost, latency, privacy, and deployment needs.
- Lead selection, evaluation, fine-tuning, optimization, and deployment of frontier, open-source, small, and domain-specific models.
- Reduce operating cost through model routing, caching, quantization, batching, retrieval and prompt optimization; design robust RAG and agentic systems with evaluation, guardrails, monitoring, and human oversight.
3. Technical Architecture and Platforms
- Serve as the final escalation point for complex architecture, performance, security, and deployment issues.
- Guide modular applications, APIs, microservices, data pipelines, AI services, cloud infrastructure, and enterprise integrations.
- Promote reusable components and strong cloud-native, CI/CD, observability, data governance, and secure-development practices.
4. Team Capability
- Mentor architects, engineering leads, data scientists, and developers through design reviews, code reviews, and technical workshops.
- Build independent problem-solving capability, identify skill gaps, and support targeted hiring and development.
- Create a culture of engineering ownership, technical rigor, experimentation, and continuous improvement.
5. Client Solutioning and Innovation
- Partner with commercial, consulting, and delivery teams on client workshops, proposals, due diligence, and solution design.
- Assess feasibility, architecture, effort, risk, and operating cost; translate business problems into pragmatic technical roadmaps.
- Develop reference architectures and accelerators that strengthen Straive's differentiation and delivery speed.
Required Experience and Qualifications
- 12–18 years across software engineering, architecture, data platforms, AI/ML, or related roles, including experience in a startup, product company, or similarly fast-moving environment.
- Proven ownership of enterprise-grade software, data, or AI products from architecture through production adoption.
- Strong hands-on engineering background, preferably in Python and modern backend/frontend technologies.
- Practical GenAI experience spanning RAG, vector search, agentic workflows, model evaluation, safety controls, and production monitoring.
- Strong command of distributed systems, APIs, microservices, cloud-native architecture, enterprise integration, and at least one major cloud platform.
- Working knowledge of containers, Kubernetes, CI/CD, infrastructure automation, observability, secure development, and modern data platforms.
- Demonstrated ability to improve solution cost, latency, scalability, reliability, and engineering quality.
- Experience mentoring senior technical professionals and communicating complex decisions to business and client leaders.
Preferred Experience
- Multi-tenant platforms, reusable AI accelerators, MLOps/LLMOps, model governance, or regulated and security-sensitive environments.
- Technical pre-sales, client workshops, proposals, solution estimation, and technical due diligence.
- A track record of taking multiple AI or software products from concept to sustained production use.
Leadership Profile
- Hands-on and accountable: Stays close to code and architecture and drives critical issues to resolution.
- Commercially pragmatic: Balances technical ambition with client value, speed, maintainability, and cost.
- Constructive challenger: Identifies weaknesses early, challenges assumptions, and raises engineering standards.
- Capability builder: Develops strong, independent teams rather than becoming the sole source of expertise.
Why Join Straive
You will shape how enterprise-grade AI solutions are architected, built, and scaled with the mandate to influence technical strategy, strengthen engineering practices, develop high-performing teams, and deliver differentiated solutions for global clients.
