Director - Engineering

Director – Engineering Experience : 10 - 15+ Years Location : Bengaluru Exxat is a US-headquartered SaaS company delivering a cloud-based education management platform for Health Sciences. Engineering is at the heart of Exxat’s mission — building reliable, scalable, and intelligent product experiences that drive outcomes for students, institutions, and clinical partners.

As Director – Engineering, you will own end-to-end engineering delivery across independent product modules and platform domains. You will lead with an AI-first mindset — embedding intelligent tooling, automation, and machine learning-assisted workflows into how the team designs, builds, and ships software.

With 10–15+ years of broad industry experience, you bring the versatility of a generalist leader who can connect product, architecture, data, and people into cohesive engineering outcomes.

Reports to: CTO Key Responsibilities:

Engineering Leadership & Delivery

• Own end-to-end engineering delivery across multiple independent product modules and platform domains

• Define and drive engineering roadmaps in close collaboration with Product, Design, and Business stakeholders

• Set and uphold engineering standards for code quality, system reliability, security, and performance

• Establish agile delivery rhythms that enable predictable, high-quality releases at scale

AI-First Engineering

• Champion an AI-first culture — embedding LLMs, copilots, and intelligent automation into engineering workflows, developer tooling, and product features

• Partner with data and product teams to identify and ship AI/ML-powered capabilities that create measurable user value

• Evaluate and adopt emerging AI tools to accelerate development velocity, reduce toil, and improve decision-making

• Drive responsible AI practices including observability, evaluation frameworks, and governance for AI-powered systems

Architecture & Platform

• Own the architecture of product modules — ensuring modularity, scalability, and maintainability across the SaaS platform

• Collaborate with infrastructure and platform teams on cloud-native architecture, CI/CD pipelines, and DevOps practices

• Drive technical debt prioritisation and architectural evolution without disrupting product delivery

• Ensure platform security, data privacy, and compliance with relevant standards (FERPA, HIPAA, SOC 2, etc.)

People & Team Building

• Build, mentor, and retain high-performing engineering teams across geographies and disciplines

• Foster a culture of ownership, psychological safety, continuous learning, and engineering excellence

• Conduct regular 1:1s, performance reviews, and career development conversations

• Partner with recruiting to attract strong engineering talent aligned to Exxat’s mission and culture

Cross-functional Collaboration & Stakeholder Communication

• Act as the primary engineering voice in cross-functional leadership discussions — translating technical constraints and opportunities into business language

• Communicate engineering status, risks, and trade-offs clearly to the CTO and executive leadership

• Partner with Customer Success, Sales Engineering, and Support to close the feedback loop on product quality and reliability

• Enable data-driven engineering decisions through clear metrics, dashboards, and outcome tracking.

Required Skills & Qualifications

Experience

• 10–15+ years of progressive experience in software engineering, with at least 3–5 years in a senior engineering leadership role

• Mandatory experience working in SaaS product environments — ideally with multi-tenant, cloud-based platforms

• Proven track record of owning and delivering multiple product modules or engineering domains simultaneously

• Experience navigating the full engineering lifecycle — from greenfield builds to scaling existing products

Technical Breadth (Generalist Mindset)

• Strong foundational knowledge across backend, frontend, data, infrastructure, and security — a true jack-of-all-trades who can engage credibly across disciplines

• Fluency in modern software architecture patterns: microservices, event-driven systems, APIs, and cloud-native design

• Hands-on familiarity with AI/ML tooling, LLM integration patterns, prompt engineering, and AI product development

• Working knowledge of DevOps practices: CI/CD, containerisation (Docker/Kubernetes), observability, and infrastructure-as-code

Leadership & Soft Skills

• Strong people leadership and organisational skills — ability to manage, develop, and inspire diverse engineering teams

• Excellent analytical and structured problem-solving capabilities; comfort operating with ambiguity

• Exceptional communication and executive presence — ability to distil complexity and influence without authority

• Customer and outcome orientation — engineering decisions anchored in business and user impact