Head of Engineering

Designation - AVP – Engineering (Head of Engineering-My11Circle)

About Us

Games24x7 is a technology-powered company delivering cutting-edge online gaming experiences across multiple formats. Our brand My11Circle is one of India's largest fantasy sports platforms, and PokerCircle is one of the leading real-money poker platforms in the country. Together, they represent our commitment to building world-class skill-based games with immersive, high-performance experiences.

At My11Circle, scale is in our DNA. Our systems handle extreme workloads — 400,000 database writes per second with 99th percentile latencies under 15 ms, and 18,000+ contest join requests per second during events like the toss time in a cricket match. Our poker platform, PokerCircle, delivers secure, real-time multiplayer gameplay with low-latency networking, complex matchmaking, and game logic — all backed by scalable microservices and robust backend design.

We operate a modern tech stack – ReactJS and React Native on the front-end, Java and Node.js on the back-end, with MySQL, MongoDB, DynamoDB, ScyllaDB, Cassandra etc. on the data layer. Our cloud-native infrastructure is built on AWS, with ML-powered autoscaling to anticipate traffic spikes and maintain top-tier performance.

If solving real-time, high-performance engineering challenges at massive scale — while building best-in-class consumer products — excites you, then you'll thrive in this role.

Role Overview

We're looking for an AVP of Engineering to lead product engineering for both My11Circle and PokerCircle. This includes end-to-end ownership of the technical execution, architecture, quality, and scalability for two of India's largest and fastest-growing gaming platforms.

You'll lead a talented team of ~50 engineers across multiple pods, working closely with product, design, analytics, and business stakeholders. The role demands deep technical expertise, strong people leadership, and a sharp product mindset. You'll ensure our platforms remain fast, reliable, and user-centric — supporting tens of millions of users during major sporting and gaming events.

This is a hands-on technical leadership role with high autonomy, where you'll influence strategy, drive innovation, and lead engineering execution across two highly dynamic and exciting products.

What You'll Do

• Lead Product Engineering Across Fantasy & Poker: Own engineering delivery for My11Circle (fantasy sports) and PokerCircle (online poker). Shape the technical roadmap in alignment with product goals, and ensure consistent innovation, speed, and scale across both platforms.
• Manage & Mentor Engineering Teams: Lead and grow a team of ~50 engineers across full-stack, backend, infrastructure, and data engineering. Build and nurture a high-performance culture with strong ownership, technical depth, and business alignment.
• Product-Centric Execution: Collaborate closely with Product Managers and Designers to translate business goals and product requirements into robust, scalable technical solutions. Ensure fast delivery of high-impact features with strong user value.
• Architect Scalable Systems: Design and oversee large-scale distributed architectures capable of supporting 50M+ users, ensuring low-latency performance and reliability. Tackle concurrency, fault tolerance, and scaling challenges for real-time gameplay and contests.
• Real-Time Game Systems: Build and optimize real-time gaming infrastructure, including multiplayer systems, contest engines, leaderboards, and matchmaking pipelines. Ensure smooth gameplay even during extreme concurrency (e.g., toss events or poker rush hours).
• Data Infrastructure & Optimization: Oversee our data stack – from relational databases to distributed NoSQL systems. Implement sharding, caching, and replication strategies to handle 400K+ writes/sec while maintaining consistency, reliability, and performance.
• ML-Driven Infrastructure Scaling: Own and evolve our ML-powered infrastructure autoscaling platform. Use predictive models to provision capacity ahead of major traffic surges (e.g., IPL finals) and optimize costs through smart resource management.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner with business, design, data science, and customer teams to align engineering with user and business outcomes. Clearly communicate engineering trade-offs, timelines, and risks across the org.
• Drive Technical Strategy & Innovation: Constantly evaluate emerging tools, frameworks, and architectural patterns. Make forward-looking decisions that modernize our stack, improve developer productivity, and drive competitive differentiation.
• Champion Engineering Excellence: Uphold high standards in code quality, testing, monitoring, observability, security, and incident response. Foster a culture of continuous improvement and operational excellence across teams.

What We're Looking For

• Experience: 15+ years in software development, with at least 5+ years in senior engineering leadership roles. Experience leading large, cross-functional teams and owning product engineering end-to-end.
• Product Engineering Leadership: Proven track record of building and scaling consumer-facing platforms. Strong experience working with product teams to define roadmaps, shape feature sets, and iterate based on customer feedback.
• Expertise in Distributed Systems: Deep understanding of high-throughput architectures, real-time systems, messaging queues, database optimization, and caching strategies.
• Cloud & DevOps Mastery: Hands-on experience with cloud-native platforms (preferably AWS), containers, CI/CD pipelines, monitoring tools, and infrastructure-as-code. Experience with auto-scaling, cost optimization, and ML-backed ops is a big plus.
• People & Stakeholder Leadership: Strong team-building and mentoring skills. Ability to communicate clearly with both technical and non-technical stakeholders and manage complex cross-functional programs.
• Execution-Focused Mindset: Bias toward action and results. Ability to make fast, pragmatic decisions in dynamic environments while building towards long-term vision.

Preferred Qualifications

• Gaming or Consumer-Tech Background: Experience building platforms in gaming, fantasy sports, poker, or real-money gaming environments is a big plus. Passion for gaming and understanding the user mindset in live games will set you apart.
• Tech Stack Familiarity: Exposure to ReactJS, React Native, Java, Node.js, MySQL, Cassandra, ScyllaDB, Kafka, Redis, AWS, Kubernetes.
• Startup & Scale Experience: Background in startups or fast-growth environments. You've scaled both systems and teams in high-pressure scenarios.
• ML-Enabled Systems: Experience applying ML in engineering — e.g., for personalization, fraud prevention, or infra scaling — is a bonus.

Why Join Us

• Impact at Scale: Your work will directly impact tens of millions of users and shape the gaming experiences of India's top fantasy and poker platforms.
• Full Product Ownership: You'll lead product engineering across two distinct gaming domains — influencing everything from gameplay to performance to reliability.
• Innovation-Friendly Culture: We encourage experimentation, support hackathons, and give you the autonomy to try bold ideas with clear user impact.
• Modern Tech & High-Caliber Team: Work on some of the most demanding real-time systems in the country, with a smart, passionate team that loves tech and games.
• Stable Yet Agile: Enjoy the dynamism of a startup, backed by the stability and resources of a profitable company that's scaling rapidly.

Come join us at Games24x7 to lead the engineering behind adrenaline at scale. Build the future of fantasy sports and poker for India and beyond.