Director of Engineering

Location : Bangalore; (Full Time, Onsite)

Battle-tested in 350+ deployments across 30+ countries, Locus is an agentic Transportation Management System for all-mile, all-channel, trusted by enterprises like Unilever, Nestlé, and Siam Makro.

The platform unifies orders, capacity, and carrier networks into one living plan, aligning planning, execution, and settlement so promises become proof. AI co-pilots with guardrails surface risk early and recommend the next best move to protect SLAs and reduce empty miles.

In 2025, Locus joined the Ingka Group (IKEA Retail) family, marking a major milestone in our journey. Backed by the scale and strength of IKEA, we continue to operate independently while accelerating our mission to make global supply chains faster, smarter, and more sustainable.

Since 2015, Locus has been on a mission to make logistics decision-making intelligent, sustainable, and real-world ready. Our platform has powered billions of deliveries across 30 + countries for global enterprises, driving measurable impact in cost savings, carbon reduction, and SLA performance. With the strength of the IKEA ecosystem behind us, we're scaling that impact even further.

Headquartered in Bangalore, with teams across the U.S., U.K., UAE, and Southeast Asia, Locus brings together 170 + engineers, designers, and problem-solvers united by a single goal: to reinvent how the world moves goods.

We look for people who are:

• Global in mindset: curious about diverse markets and ideas.
• Unrelenting in drive: energized by complex challenges.
• Intelligent in approach: analytical, creative, and thoughtful.
• Dynamic in execution: adaptive and decisive in fast-moving contexts.
• Exact in craft: detail-oriented and committed to excellence.

Role Overview

As a Director of Engineering at Locus, you will play a mission-critical role in shaping and scaling the core technology that powers global supply chains. You will lead engineering teams that build our agentic Transportation Management System—now operating across 30+ countries, used by enterprises like Unilever, Nestlé, and IKEA Retail.

The Director of Engineering at Locus is the end-to-end engineering owner of the system, accountable for technology excellence, delivery reliability, and team effectiveness across their portfolio. This role combines hands-on technical leadership, execution ownership, and people leadership to ensure Locus platforms scale reliably, ship predictably, and meet demanding enterprise SLAs.

In this role, the Director of Engineering:

• Sets and upholds the technical bar through architectural leadership, deep design reviews, and guidance on complex backend, platform, and optimization systems.
• Owns delivery outcomes, ensuring high-quality, production-ready features are shipped on committed timelines with strong operational readiness.
• Builds and develops high-performing engineering teams, mentoring engineering managers and senior ICs while driving capability uplift across architecture, coding, and execution.
• Acts as a cross-functional leader, partnering with Product, SRE, QA, Data Science, and GTM teams to align priorities, manage trade-offs, and deliver business impact.
• Drives engineering culture and fundamentals, including ownership, craftsmanship, CI/CD quality, observability, reliability, and long-term system health.
• Leads strategic engineering initiatives such as platform modernization, AI/optimization scaling, performance improvements, and global infrastructure evolution.

• Strong systems thinking with the ability to design, evolve, and operate large-scale, distributed platforms.
• Sound judgment in balancing technical quality, delivery speed, reliability, and cost.
• Proven ability to own end-to-end execution of complex, multi-team engineering programs.
• Experience building, scaling, and leading high-performing engineering teams, including managers and senior ICs.
• Effective people leadership skills—coaching, feedback, capability assessment, and succession planning.
• Strong cross-functional leadership, partnering closely with Product, SRE, QA, Data Science, and GTM teams.
• Ability to communicate technical decisions, risks, and trade-offs clearly to executives and business stakeholders.
• Deep appreciation for engineering excellence fundamentals: quality, reliability, observability, and operational readiness.
• Solid grounding in modern engineering practices, including agile execution, CI/CD, and continuous improvement.
• Business-oriented mindset with an understanding of how engineering decisions drive customer outcomes and company growth.

• Bachelor's/Master's degree in Computer Science or related field.
• 14+ years of experience building and scaling enterprise-grade software platforms; at least 5–6 years in senior engineering leadership roles.
• Proven experience leading multiple engineering teams and managers; comfortable with 20–40 engineering spans.
• Hands-on experience with large-scale backend systems, distributed architectures, and cloud environments (AWS preferred).
• Strong understanding of microservices, messaging systems (Kafka, Redis, RabbitMQ), and Databases.
• Demonstrated ability to take products from concept design delivery operation in production environments.
• Track record of building high-performing teams, improving engineering culture, and scaling technology to meet business growth.
• Experience of improving operational efficiency, uptime, managing production incidents and RCA, developer efficiency and infrastructure cost control.
• Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills, especially for cross-functional and executive-level alignment.

Why Join Us?

Join Locus and become part of a visionary team that is redefining logistics through innovation and smart distribution.

We provide competitive compensation, comprehensive benefits, and a collaborative environment where your expertise will drive both your growth and that of the organization.

Locus is an equal opportunity employer dedicated to creating a diverse and inclusive workplace.