Ass. Director/Director – Engineering Delivery

About Us: At Molecular Connections, we believe in "Connecting brilliant minds, for building the future of scientific intelligence. Founded more than two decades ago, Molecular Connections is the leading AI-ML led data science organization accelerating digital transformation of Scientific Scholarly Publishing, STEM (science, technology, engineering and medical) and pharmaceutical data science/information/analytics domains, globally. Our marquee customer base is spread across US, UK, Europe and other geographies. Headquartered in Bengaluru, our technology and customer delivery centers are based across various tier 1 and tier 2 cities across south India. We are growing strongly both organically and inorganically with our latest technology-driven acquisitions in Germany and UK..Role: Ass. Director/Director – Engineering DeliveryThe Director, Engineering Delivery is a strategic technology leadership role reporting to the CTO. This role is responsible for ensuring the seamless, end-to-end delivery of complex, mission-critical technology solutions for major STEM publishers. You will bridge engineering excellence with business outcomes, driving the adoption of Cloud, NLP, ML, LLM, and GenAI models into high-volume knowledge work delivery workflows that require 24/7 availability and unwavering quality standards.Reporting & Stake Holders ManagementReports to: Chief Technology Officer (CTO)Key Stakeholders:HoDs of Knowledge Work Teams (Editorial, Data Structuring, A&I, Tagging, Enrichment)Chief Information Security Officer (CISO)Finance & Resource Planning teamsQuality Assurance & Customer Success teamsKey ResponsibilitiesTechnology Solutions Implementation & Architecture Review implementation of end-to-end technology solutions for A&I, tagging, enrichment, and data structuring workflows, ensuring alignment with customer requirements and company technical standards.Lead the evaluation, selection, and deployment of Cloud infrastructure platforms that enable high availability, auto-scaling, and cost optimization for variable workloads.Define and enforce technology architecture standards for multi-tenant, multi-project environments supporting concurrent STEM publisher contracts.Oversee the integration of NLP, ML, LLM, and GenAI models into production workflows, ensuring reproducibility, governance, auditability, and performance optimization.Establish and maintain comprehensive solution documentation, including system design, deployment guides, runbooks, and troubleshooting protocols.Delivery Capability & Resource Planning Assess and continuously optimize delivery capacity across teams to meet contractual SLAs and handle demand volatility.Develop and manage resource allocation strategies that balance technical expertise, project criticality, timeline, and cost, adapting to month-to-month volume fluctuations without compromising quality.Build predictive capacity models for both knowledge workers and engineering support, enabling proactive staffing and infrastructure provisioning.Oversee project scheduling, milestone tracking, and delivery timelines for PoCs, Production Go-Lives, Scaling initiatives, and ongoing Support.Partner with HoDs to identify bottlenecks, optimize workflow processes, and allocate specialized resources (e.g., Domain Experts, QA Engineers, DevOps) to high-impact initiatives.Change Management & Continuous ImprovementChampion a culture of continuous improvement by working with HoDs and knowledge worker teams to identify automation opportunities, eliminate manual handoffs, and increase operational efficiency.Lead change management initiatives when deploying new tools, platforms, or process improvements, ensuring minimal disruption and high adoption rates.Develop and deliver training programs and knowledge-sharing sessions to upskill teams on new technology capabilities, automation frameworks, and best practices.Establish feedback loops from production teams to engineering, ensuring that operational insights drive product and platform evolution.Drive metrics-driven decision-making by establishing clear KPIs for delivery, efficiency, quality, and cost; regularly reviewing performance with stakeholders.Risk Mitigation & High AvailabilityIdentify, assess, and mitigate risks across all phases of solution delivery—from design through production, scaling, and support—including technical, operational, contractual, and compliance risks.Design and implement redundancy, failover mechanisms, and disaster recovery (DR) strategies to ensure 99.9%+ uptime SLAs for mission-critical systems.Lead root cause analysis (RCA) for critical failures, ensuring systematic remediation and knowledge capture.Proactively monitor system health, performance, and security posture using automated monitoring, alerting, and observability tools.Conduct regular DR drills and failover testing to validate recovery procedures.AI/ML/LLM/GenAI Integration & GovernanceLead the adoption of machine learning and generative AI models to automate knowledge work (e.g., auto-tagging, entity recognition, metadata enrichment, quality prediction).Establish ML Ops practices, including model versioning, performance tracking, retraining pipelines, and A/B testing frameworks.Ensure AI model governance, including explainability, bias detection, and audit trails for compliance and customer transparency.Work with data engineering and data science teams to prepare training data, validate model outputs, and integrate models into production workflows.Balance innovation with stability—managing the transition from experimental (PoC) models to production-grade systems with SLA guarantees.Security, Compliance & PrivacyPartner with CISO and Compliance teams to ensure all technology solutions meet ISO 27001:2022, ISO 27701:2025 standards and customer-specific security requirements.Conduct or oversee regular security audits, penetration testing, and vulnerability assessments; remediate findings on schedule.Implement privacy-by-design principles in all systems, ensuring data minimization, encryption, access controls, and audit logging.Maintain and regularly test data backup, disaster recovery, and business continuity plans.Lead security training for engineering and support teams; foster a culture of security awareness.Integration with 3rd Party Systems & APIsDesign and oversee integrations with customer publishing platforms, vendor systems (ScholarOne, Morressier, Altmetric, Crossref, etc.), and internal systems (DSS, MCAcademy etc).Establish API standards, versioning, rate-limiting, and security practices.Manage vendor relationships and SLA compliance with critical partners.Ensure robust error handling, monitoring, and alerting for integrated workflows.Production Support & ScalabilityEstablish 24/7/365 production support processes, including on-call rotations, escalation paths, and SLA-driven response times.Define and implement monitoring, logging, and observability strategies to detect and resolve issues proactively.Build playbooks and knowledge bases for common operational scenarios, reducing mean time to resolution (MTTR).Lead Scaling initiatives when customer demand increases, ensuring infrastructure, staffing, processes, and quality control scale in parallel.Conduct post-implementation reviews (PIRs) after major milestones (Go-Live, Scaling) to capture lessons learned and continuously improve.Feedback Management & Customer SuccessPrioritize and triage feedback into product roadmap, training needs, or process improvements.Work closely with Customer Success and Account Management teams to ensure contractual commitments are met and exceeded.Conduct regular business reviews with customers and internal stakeholders to assess satisfaction, identify improvement opportunities, and align on roadmap priorities.Invoicing, SLA Tracking & Financial StewardshipCollaborate with Finance to ensure accurate tracking of billable metrics, resource utilization, and cost allocation across projects.Maintain transparent SLA dashboards and reporting, communicating performance against contractual commitments.Develop business cases for technology investments, demonstrating ROI through improved efficiency, reduced defects, or enhanced capacity.Drive cost optimization initiatives (e.g., cloud cost reduction, automation savings, reduced manual labor) while maintaining quality. Required Qualifications & Skills:Experience: 15+ years of progressive technology leadership, with ≥5 years managing engineering delivery teams.Technical Expertise: Deep, hands-on expertise in Cloud Architecture (Azure/AWS/GCP), DevOps/CI/CD (Terraform, Kubernetes), ML Ops, Security (ISO 27001/27701), and designing scalable systems for high-volume data processing.Domain (Preferred): Experience in STM/Scholarly Publishing, KPO, or Content Services is strongly valued.Leadership: Strategic thinking, strong people leadership (mentoring/scaling teams), cross-functional collaboration, and exceptional communication skills to manage C-suite and customer expectations.Why Join Molecular Connections?This is a unique opportunity to join a mission-driven company at a pivotal time in its growth in building the next-generation scientific intelligence platform. You will be a key part of our vision to "build the future of scientific intelligence," with a clear path for professional growth and a chance to make a lasting impact on our organization and a competitive remuneration with other benefits commensurate with candidates’ experience and track record.