Vice President Engineering

Educational Qualification

1. B.Tech./B.E. in Computer Science, Information Technology, or a related engineering discipline (Must have)

2. M.Tech./M.S. in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field preferred

3. Certifications (Desirable): Cloud/architecture professional (AWS/Azure/GCP), TOGAF, or programme-management certifications (PMP, PRINCE2, SAFe)

Experience

1. 15+ years of experience in software engineering, platform, or product engineering, with a substantial record of senior technical and organisational leadership

2. Proven experience leading the design, delivery, and operation of large-scale, high-availability software platforms in production

3. Extensive people-leadership experience, having led multi-disciplinary engineering organisations, including engineering managers and technical leads

4. Track record of delivering large, multi-workstream technology programmes to schedule and budget, with accountability for outcomes, quality, reliability, and cost

5. Demonstrated experience owning technology strategy and architecture for an enterprise or platform operating at scale

6. Experience building and scaling high-performing engineering teams, including talent acquisition, capability development, and the management of delivery partners and vendors

7. Strong, current technical grounding in modern software architecture and engineering practice, with the standing to set technical direction and make architecture decisions

8. Prior Government/PSU experience is not essential; the ability to operate within public-sector requirements for data protection, sovereign infrastructure, procurement, and audit is expected

Key Responsibilities

Programme Leadership & Strategy

1. Set the vision, strategy, and delivery roadmap for engineering services across Digital India platforms and cross-ministerial systems

2. Lead the end-to-end delivery of the programmes portfolio of engineering initiatives across the capability teams, ensuring timely, high-quality, and measurable outcomes

3. Establish and run programme governance planning, prioritisation, risk management, and delivery reporting and present progress and outcomes to NeGD leadership

4. Own the programme budget and cost governance, ensuring efficient use of infrastructure, tooling, and manpower against the approved envelope

Technical & Architectural Direction

1. Own the engineering technical strategy and target-state architecture across capability teams — Platform Engineering; Application Development; API & Integration Services; Data & Analytics Engineering; DevOps & Site Reliability; and Quality Engineering

2. Set standards for technology selection and build-versus-buy decisions, including the use of open-source components, cloud-native services, and sovereign infrastructure

3. Act as the design authority for the programme, approving reference architectures, integration standards, engineering frameworks, and deployment patterns

4. Ensure reusable engineering components — APIs, SDKs, shared libraries, and templates — are produced to a common standard and published for cross-ministry reuse

Organisation & Delivery

1. Mentor the engineering teams and the capability-pod leadership, scaling the organisation in line with validated demand

2. Direct and coordinate the programme’s functional and technical resources as a single, integrated delivery organisation

3. Establish the operating model, engineering standards, and delivery culture for a fast-growing national engineering capability

4. Establish DevOps/SRE practices — CI/CD, release management, monitoring for reliability and performance, and cost-effective operations at production scale

Empanelment, Procurement & Partnerships

1. Govern the engagement of empanelled agencies at the discovered L1 rate card across resource, project, and turnkey modes — including agency selection, performance management, acceptance, and service levels

2. Manage relationships with technology, cloud, and infrastructure providers, including commercial terms, performance, and risk

Governance, Security & Compliance

1. Ensure all engineering systems are delivered in line with applicable governance frameworks — risk assessment, change management, quality assurance, and audit

2. Ensure security and data protection by design across the programme, in line with MeitY security standards, CERT-In directions, and the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023

3. Ensure the appropriate use of sovereign infrastructure and coordinate with other MeitY agencies where relevant

Technical Competencies

1. Software Engineering & Architecture: Strong command of modern software engineering — distributed systems, microservices, event-driven architecture, and full-stack application development

2. DevOps & Site Reliability Engineering: CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure as code, release management, monitoring, and reliable production operations at scale

3. Solution & Platform Architecture: Microservices, event-driven and API-based design, service gateways, and multi-cloud, on-premise, and sovereign deployment patterns

4. Quality Engineering & Testing: Automated testing frameworks, performance testing, and quality assurance practices across the software development lifecycle

5. Cloud & Infrastructure: Cloud architecture, identity and access management, scalability and reliability, and observability

6. Cost Governance: Unit economics and cost management for compute, storage, and infrastructure, and forecasting against a programme budget

7. Programme & Delivery Management: Programme governance, portfolio prioritisation, budgeting, risk management, and multi-workstream delivery

8. Security, Data Protection & Compliance: Access control, encryption, audit, the Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023, CERT-In directions, and MeitY security standards

9. Organisational Leadership: Organisation design, hiring and capability development, performance management, and the management of delivery partners and vendors

10. Communication & Stakeholder Engagement: Executive communication of strategy, progress, and risk; leading technical reviews; and building alignment across technical and functional teams