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 Delivery

The 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 Management

• Reports 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 teams
• Quality Assurance & Customer Success teams

Key Responsibilities

Technology 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 Improvement

• Champion 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 Availability

• Identify, 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 & Governance

• Lead 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 & Privacy

• Partner 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 & APIs

• Design 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 & Scalability

• Establish 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 Success

• Prioritize 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 Stewardship

• Collaborate 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.