Vice President, Software Engineering

Job Purpose:

The Vice President of Software Engineering India is the most senior technology leader in Cendyn India and is accountable for building and operating Cendyns India engineering organization as a strategic product-owning center of excellence. This role is explicitly not a back-office delivery or staff-augmentation function it is a full engineering leadership role with end-to-end ownership of meaningful product areas across the Cendyn portfolio.

This is a hands-on technical leadership role. The VP is expected to be deeply engaged in architecture design code quality and incident response while leading a team of Engineering Managers and Senior Engineering Managers and the engineers reporting to them. The VP is not expected to perform day-to-day implementation work but is expected to read code lead architectural decisions debug hard production problems alongside their teams and personally own technical strategy documents.

The VP partners closely with the CTO engineering leaders in the US and EMEA Product Management and the executive leadership team to deliver against Cendyns enterprise technology strategy including its multi-product platform agenda and its enterprise AI agenda.

Scope and Reporting

• Reports to: Chief Technology Officer.
• Site leader for Cendyn India engineering: accountable for the engineering health output and culture of the entire India software engineering organization across multiple product lines.
• Direct reports include Senior Engineering Managers and Engineering Managers; full org of approximately 100150 engineers today with planned growth.
• Owns end-to-end engineering responsibility for designated product areas partnering with Product Management on roadmap prioritization and delivery.
• Member of Cendyns global engineering leadership team and the senior in-country leader for India.
• Represents Cendyn India to internal executives strategic customers partners and Indian regulators or industry bodies as required.

Essential Functions and Responsibilities

Hands-On Technical Leadership

• Set and enforce engineering standards (architecture design coding standards testing code review observability) for India-led product areas in alignment with Cendyns enterprise architecture standards.
• Lead architectural decisions on India-owned systems; author or co-author technical strategy and architecture documents for major initiatives.
• Personally engage in design reviews code review on critical-path changes post-incident reviews and the resolution of severe production issues.
• Drive a sustained reduction in technical debt including modernization of legacy components inherited from acquisitions balancing customer impact cost and risk.
• Maintain enough technical depth to be credible to senior engineers including hands-on familiarity with Cendyns primary languages cloud platforms data stores and CI/CD tooling without becoming a full-time individual contributor.
• Champion modern engineering practice: trunk-based development continuous integration automated testing infrastructure as code and DORA-aligned metrics.

Engineering Management (Manager of Managers)

• Lead develop and hold accountable a team of Engineering Managers and Senior Engineering Managers; build a strong manager bench at every level.
• Set clear performance expectations run quarterly performance and calibration cycles and make and defend hire/no-hire and performance management decisions.
• Coach managers on hiring performance management technical decision-making conflict resolution and stakeholder management.
• Drive an engineering operating cadence (planning standups reviews retros incident reviews) that is consistent with Cendyns global cadence and works inside Indian working hours.
• Establish and continuously refine career ladders promotion criteria and growth paths for engineers and engineering managers in India in lockstep with Cendyns global frameworks.

India Site Leadership

• Build and grow Cendyn India as a strategic product-owning center of excellence not as a cost-arbitrage outsourcing arm; expand the scope and seniority of work owned in India over time.
• Set the culture leadership tone and engineering identity of the India organization high standards ownership customer focus and pride in technical craft.
• Partner with HR/People Talent Acquisition Finance Legal and Facilities on hiring strategy compensation philosophy retention immigration office operations and compliance with Indian labor and employment law.
• Own attrition aggressively: build a retention strategy specifically calibrated to the Indian tech labor market (compensation positioning career growth technical brand manager quality work environment).
• Represent Cendyn India to local industry bodies universities and the broader engineering community; build Cendyns technical employer brand in India.
• Ensure compliance with Indian regulations including the Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act applicable labor laws statutory benefits and any sector-specific obligations.

AI and Modern Engineering Capability Build-out

• Grow Cendyn Indias AI and ML engineering capability in alignment with the CTOs enterprise AI strategy. This includes AI Product Engineering (LLM-powered features RAG agentic patterns evaluation frameworks) MLOps (model deployment monitoring drift detection retraining) and underlying data platform engineering.
• Drive adoption of AI-assisted engineering tooling within the India organization to lift productivity with measurable reported outcomes.
• Ensure AI features built or operated out of India meet Cendyns standards for evaluation safety customer trust and applicable AI regulation (EU AI Act emerging Indian AI guidance etc.).
• Identify and develop AI technical leaders within the India organization to anchor long-term capability.

Cross-Region Collaboration

• Partner closely with engineering leaders in the US and EMEA to ensure that India is treated as a peer engineering site not a downstream delivery shop.
• Establish operating norms handoffs on-call design reviews decision-making that allow a 24-hour follow-the-sun engineering organization to function without burning out any region.
• Be a constructive advocate for Indias working hours holidays and cultural context with US and EMEA peers while expecting the India team to meet Cendyns global standards for collaboration responsiveness and quality.
• Travel internationally on a periodic cadence to build and maintain relationships across regions and with strategic customers.

Product Customer and Stakeholder Partnership

• Partner with Product Management on roadmap scoping sequencing and tradeoffs for India-led product areas.
• Engage directly with strategic customers as required: technical escalations architecture discussions executive sponsor moments.
• Partner with Customer Support and Customer Success on the customer-impact view of engineering quality including incident communication and remediation commitments.
• Partner with Sales Engineering and Solutions Architecture on technical pre-sales support originated from India.

Engineering Operations Quality and Reliability

• Own customer-facing reliability for India-operated systems including SLAs/SLOs on-call rotations observability capacity planning and disaster recovery.
• Establish and enforce a unified SDLC across India teams: secure coding code review automated testing deployment automation and release governance.
• Drive measurable improvement against DORA metrics and customer-reported defect rates.
• Own engineering budget for the India organization including headcount plan vendor and tooling spend and cloud cost discipline.

Security Privacy and Compliance

• Accountable for the security posture of India-built and India-operated software in partnership with Cendyns enterprise security and compliance leadership.
• Ensure that India engineering meets requirements under SOC 2 Type II PCI-DSS ISO 27001 GDPR CCPA and the Indian DPDP Act.
• Champion security-by-design and privacy-by-design within India engineering teams; ensure secure coding training and audit readiness.

Required Qualifications

Experience

• 10 years of software engineering experience including 5 years leading managers (i.e. as a manager-of-managers Director or VP).
• Demonstrated experience leading engineering organizations of 100 engineers at a B2B SaaS or enterprise software company.
• Demonstrated experience operating as a senior site leader for an India engineering center of a global company ideally one where India is treated as a strategic capability rather than a delivery shop.
• Track record of shipping production cloud-native multi-tenant SaaS at meaningful scale with direct accountability for reliability and customer outcomes.
• Demonstrated success building scaling and retaining engineering organizations in the Indian tech labor market including hiring senior engineers and managers in a competitive environment.
• Hands-on technical credibility: comfortable in code reviews architecture discussions incident response and technical interviews; respected by senior engineers as a technical peer not just a manager.
• Demonstrated experience partnering with US- and/or Europe-based product engineering and executive leadership across time zones.

Technical Depth

• Modern cloud-native distributed-systems multi-tenant SaaS architecture (AWS Azure or GCP).
• Strong fluency in at least one major backend stack used in production B2B SaaS plus working familiarity with associated data messaging and observability ecosystems.
• Modern engineering practice: trunk-based development CI/CD automated testing at scale infrastructure as code observability and DORA metrics.
• Working understanding of AI/ML systems in production including LLM application architecture RAG MLOps and AI cost/performance tradeoffs; depth in AI is preferred.
• Application and infrastructure security and compliance frameworks (SOC 2 PCI-DSS GDPR DPDP).

Leadership and Behavioral

• Proven ability to attract develop and retain senior engineering managers and principal-level engineers in India.
• Strong written and verbal English communication; comfortable presenting to a CEO CTO executive team and customers.
• High ownership and bias to action; willing to make and defend unpopular decisions when warranted.
• Cross-cultural fluency; experienced and effective in working with US and European leadership and customers.
• Coaching and developing leaders is a clear personal strength not a chore.
• Bias toward measurable outcomes; track record of using data and KPIs to manage engineering functions.

Education

• Bachelors degree in Computer Science Engineering or related discipline required.
• Masters degree preferred but not required if demonstrated experience is exceptional.

Preferred Qualifications

• Prior VP- or senior Director-level engineering leadership in hospitality travel hotel distribution or guest engagement technology.
• Direct experience growing an India engineering site from sub-100 to 200 engineers including building out the manager bench.
• Prior experience integrating engineering teams from acquired companies into a single operating model.
• Prior experience leading or growing AI/ML engineering capability in a production B2B SaaS context.
• Active presence in the Indian engineering community (speaking mentoring university engagement) supporting employer brand.

Work Environment

This role is based in India and requires a regular on-site presence at the Cendyn Hyderabad office to lead the team support new joiners and build culture. Cendyn operates a hybrid work model; the specific on-site cadence will be agreed with the CTO and reviewed against organizational needs.

Standard business hours are aligned to Indian working hours with the explicit understanding that the role requires regular evening engagement to overlap with US and EMEA peers and customers. Weekend or off-hours engagement may be required during major incidents releases or customer escalations.

Travel

This role requires periodic international travel to Cendyn locations in the US and EMEA and to strategic customer sites and industry events. Domestic travel within India may also be required.

EEO Statement

Cendyn provides equal employment opportunities (EEO) to all employees and applicants for employment without regard to race color religion sex national origin age disability or addition to federal law requirements Cendyn complies with applicable state and local laws governing nondiscrimination in employment in every location in which the company has facilities. This policy applies to all terms and conditions of employment including recruiting hiring placement promotion termination layoff recall transfer leaves of absence compensation and training.

Cendyn expressly prohibits any form of workplace harassment based on race color religion gender sexual orientation gender identity or expression national origin age genetic information disability or veteran status. Improper interference with the ability of Cendyns employees to perform their job duties may result in discipline up to and including discharge.

Other Duties

Please note this job description is not designed to cover or contain a comprehensive listing of activities duties or responsibilities that are required of the employee for this job. Duties responsibilities and activities may change at any time with or without notice.