Director - Engineering (Backend)

All about Zeta :

Zeta is a Next-Gen Banking Tech company that empowers banks and fintechs to launch banking products for the future. It was founded by and Ramki Gaddipati in 2015.

Our flagship processing platform - Zeta Tachyon - is the industry's first modern, cloud-native, and fully API-enabled stack that brings together issuance, processing, lending, core banking, fraud & risk, and many more capabilities as a single-vendor stack. 20M+ cards have been issued on our platform globally.

Zeta is actively working with the largest Banks and Fintechs in multiple global markets transforming customer experience for multi-million card portfolios.

Zeta has over 1,700+ employees across the US, EMEA, and Asia, with 70%+ roles in R&D . Backed by SoftBank, Mastercard, and other investors , we raised $330M at a $2B valuation in 2025.

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The Role:

You will lead the team that builds large-scale card issuing and transaction processing systems executing hundreds on policies with sub-second latencies. You will provide engineering leadership to both internal and market facing technical partnerships - helping take technical and operational decisions for long term success of the product and organization.

As a Director of Engineering, you will be playing a pivotal role in enabling Zeta to deliver to its ambitions. You will work with an amazing peer group that fuels this ambition. You will take up initiatives that will transform the banking industry and modernize banking globally. You will be responsible for several engineering teams each with 8-12 people. Overall your span of management could include 60 to 90 engineers and 6-8 engineering managers.

Responsibilities

• Define technology roadmap for various products of a business unit. Align choices to overall organization technology strategy.
• Work closely with teams to review architectural and technological choices for functional, cost and time to deliver fitment.
• Optimize processes for productivity.
• Build teams, assess skill gaps, plan upskilling exercises.
• Collaborate with operations teams to monitor and assure SLA adherence of all services.
• Collaborate with directors and managers of QA, Project, UX and other teams for staffing each project appropriately.
• Mentor and manage engineering managers for effective delivery of projects
• Percolate the benefits of the relevant technological choices to Product, Operations, Business and Executive teams.
• Be responsible to ship products at high quality in a timely manner.

Skills

• Good understanding of distributed systems, micro-services, messaging systems and associated architectural patterns.
• In-depth understanding of traditional relational databases and various key-value document stores.
• Thorough understanding of transactional and analytical workloads
• Mastery in Object-oriented analysis and design.
• Good understanding of web and mobile application technology stack.
• Practitioners understand of Non-functional requirements of software and ability to make appropriate trade-off decisions
• Experience with CI/CD environments and automation test frameworks
• Good understanding of agile development practices
• Familiarity with production operations of large-scale systems

Experience & Qualifications

• Bachelor's/Master's degree in engineering (computer science, information systems)
• 15+ years of strong experience managing software projects right from inception to launch, seeing the full lifecycle, building enterprise systems including at least 3 years of direct people management experience
• Worked on large scale java / JSP applications with good understanding of web stack
• Good understanding of nuances of distributed systems
• Good understanding of relational databases (preferred - MySQL / PostgreSQL)
• Good understanding of reporting/BI systems (preferred - Crystal, Jasper)Worked with IaaS like AWS / GCP / Azure etc..
• Worked with Message Brokers and Application Containers
• Analyse, design and architect, develop and maintain software solutions across multiple projects
• Direct and provide ongoing leadership for a team of individual contributors, set objectives, review performances, define growth plan and nurture.

Equal Opportunity

Zeta is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. We encourage applicants from all backgrounds, cultures, and communities to apply and believe that a diverse workforce is key to our success