Director of Engineering

Location: Bengaluru (WFO - Onsite)
Function: Engineering
Reports to: Head Of Engineering / CTO

Role Summary

We’re looking for a Director of Engineering to lead the Engineering team and efforts for Marketplace Business at Apna – owning end-to-end journeys for both employers and candidates. You’ll drive strategy, architecture, and execution across multiple pods building job discovery, matching, and conversion on top of our Go + GCP stack.

You’ll work closely with Product, Data, Design, Analytics and Business to build a high-liquidity, high-trust jobs marketplace at scale.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead Marketplace Pods (Employer + Candidate)
• Own the engineering roadmap for all marketplace pods: employer funnels (posting → hires) and candidate funnels (discovery → apply → hire).
• Ensure pods are mission-aligned, autonomous, and deliver outcomes tied to marketplace health (fill-rate, time-to-hire, retention).
• Drive strong collaboration between PMs, EMs, tech leads, and data within each pod.
  
• Technical Strategy on Go + GCP
• Set the technical direction for Go-based microservices running on GCP (GKE, Pub/Sub, Cloud SQL/Spanner, etc.).
• Define service boundaries, APIs, and data contracts that allow pods to move fast without breaking each other.
• Champion best practices in performance, reliability, security, and cost efficiency on GCP.
  
• Architecture & Scale
• Own architecture for search, recommendations, ranking/matching, eligibility, and billing/workflows across the marketplace.
• Ensure systems are highly available, low latency, and horizontally scalable for millions of users.
• Partner with Data/ML teams to productionize models (ranking, fraud/abuse, quality scoring) within Go services.
• Execution & Engineering Excellence
• Lead and grow Engineering Managers and senior Go engineers across multiple pods.
• Implement strong delivery practices: OKRs, roadmap planning, design/code reviews, SLIs/SLOs, on-call, and incident management.
• Balance experimentation (A/B tests) with platform stability and technical debt management.
• Stakeholder & People Leadership
• Partner with the Head of Product, Business, and Operations to translate marketplace strategy into clear technical plans.
• Represent marketplace engineering in leadership reviews with clear narratives on trade-offs and progress.
• Build a culture of ownership, speed with quality, and data-driven decisions; define career paths and growth for EMs and ICs.

Requirements

What We’re Looking For

• Must-Have
• 10–15+ years of experience in software engineering, with 5+ years leading managers and multi-pod / multi-team orgs.
• Experience owning a two-sided marketplace or large-scale consumer/B2B2C product.
• Strong hands-on background in Go and cloud-native architectures on GCP (or similar, with willingness to go deep on GCP).
• Proven track record of shipping distributed systems / microservices at scale.
• Comfort with experimentation and data: funnels, cohorts, A/B testing, marketplace health metrics.
• Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills.
  
• Nice-to-Have
• Experience with search, recommendations, ranking, or ads-like systems.
• Prior work in India-focused high-growth startups.
• Exposure to React / React Native frontends and mobile-heavy products.