Educational Qualification
- B.Tech./B.E. in Computer Science, Information Technology, or a related engineering discipline (Must have)
- M.Tech./M.S. in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field preferred
- Certifications (Desirable): Cloud/architecture professional (AWS/Azure/GCP), TOGAF, or programme-management certifications (PMP, PRINCE2, SAFe)
Experience
- 15+ years of experience in software engineering, platform, or product engineering, with a substantial record of senior technical and organisational leadership
- Proven experience leading the design, delivery, and operation of large-scale, high-availability software platforms in production
- Extensive people-leadership experience, having led multi-disciplinary engineering organisations, including engineering managers and technical leads
- Track record of delivering large, multi-workstream technology programmes to schedule and budget, with accountability for outcomes, quality, reliability, and cost
- Demonstrated experience owning technology strategy and architecture for an enterprise or platform operating at scale
- Experience building and scaling high-performing engineering teams, including talent acquisition, capability development, and the management of delivery partners and vendors
- Strong, current technical grounding in modern software architecture and engineering practice, with the standing to set technical direction and make architecture decisions
- 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
- Set the vision, strategy, and delivery roadmap for engineering services across Digital India platforms and cross-ministerial systems
- Lead the end-to-end delivery of the programme’s portfolio of engineering initiatives across the capability teams, ensuring timely, high-quality, and measurable outcomes
- Establish and run programme governance — planning, prioritisation, risk management, and delivery reporting — and present progress and outcomes to NeGD leadership
- Own the programme budget and cost governance, ensuring efficient use of infrastructure, tooling, and manpower against the approved envelope
Technical & Architectural Direction
- 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
- Set standards for technology selection and build-versus-buy decisions, including the use of open-source components, cloud-native services, and sovereign infrastructure
- Act as the design authority for the programme, approving reference architectures, integration standards, engineering frameworks, and deployment patterns
- Ensure reusable engineering components — APIs, SDKs, shared libraries, and templates — are produced to a common standard and published for cross-ministry reuse
Organisation & Delivery
- Mentor the engineering teams and the capability-pod leadership, scaling the organisation in line with validated demand
- Direct and coordinate the programme’s functional and technical resources as a single, integrated delivery organisation
- Establish the operating model, engineering standards, and delivery culture for a fast-growing national engineering capability
- Establish DevOps/SRE practices — CI/CD, release management, monitoring for reliability and performance, and cost-effective operations at production scale
Empanelment, Procurement & Partnerships
- 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
- Manage relationships with technology, cloud, and infrastructure providers, including commercial terms, performance, and risk
Governance, Security & Compliance
- Ensure all engineering systems are delivered in line with applicable governance frameworks — risk assessment, change management, quality assurance, and audit
- 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
- Ensure the appropriate use of sovereign infrastructure and coordinate with other MeitY agencies where relevant
Technical Competencies
- Software Engineering & Architecture: Strong command of modern software engineering — distributed systems, microservices, event-driven architecture, and full-stack application development
- DevOps & Site Reliability Engineering: CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure as code, release management, monitoring, and reliable production operations at scale
- Solution & Platform Architecture: Microservices, event-driven and API-based design, service gateways, and multi-cloud, on-premise, and sovereign deployment patterns
- Quality Engineering & Testing: Automated testing frameworks, performance testing, and quality assurance practices across the software development lifecycle
- Cloud & Infrastructure: Cloud architecture, identity and access management, scalability and reliability, and observability
- Cost Governance: Unit economics and cost management for compute, storage, and infrastructure, and forecasting against a programme budget
- Programme & Delivery Management: Programme governance, portfolio prioritisation, budgeting, risk management, and multi-workstream delivery
- Security, Data Protection & Compliance: Access control, encryption, audit, the Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023, CERT-In directions, and MeitY security standards
- Organisational Leadership: Organisation design, hiring and capability development, performance management, and the management of delivery partners and vendors
- Communication & Stakeholder Engagement: Executive communication of strategy, progress, and risk; leading technical reviews; and building alignment across technical and functional teams