Senior Engineering Manager

Overview

We are seeking an exceptional Senior Engineering leader to join the Critical Start Technologies Private Ltd. team, operating under the Critical Start umbrella, for our India operations. This role will report directly to the VP of Engineering and Site Leader at our Center of Excellence (CoE) in Pune, India. This role provides technical leadership for our web and mobile End User Experiences, DevOps, and AI/ML (in the future)  initiatives.This position will play a key role in advancing our engineering capabilities, fostering operational excellence, and accelerating innovation within our India operations.

Responsibilities

Engineering and Operational Leadership

• Lead and build one or more teams of engineers building Cybersecurity Detection & Response software offerings, with a focus on backend systems, Cloud engineering andAI/ML engineering / operations.
• Manage organizational structure and workload, project resourcing & coordination in a fast-paced, highly distributed environment with rapid iteration cycles.
• Inspire and guide engineering teams to drive innovation and maintain high performance.
• Champion Agile best practices and contribute to technical engineering designs.
• Oversee technical training programs and uphold high coding standards.
• Develop and track key engineering performance metrics to ensure project success and team growth.
• Contribute to technical architecture decisions for cloud-based SaaS solutions.
• Participate in team activities, such as release and technical roadmap planning, to prioritize engineering work based on availability of people to do the work and business objectives that need to be met.

Partnership & Collaboration

• Effectively collaborate with leaders within and outside organization to deliver on product roadmap and delight customers.
• Foster strong cross-functional and cross-regional collaboration.
• Ensure seamless integration between India and global operations.

Talent & Culture

• Attract, retain, and develop top talent across all functions.
• Actively engage in recruitment, mentorship, and leadership development initiatives.
• Foster a culture of creativity, agility, and continuous innovation.
• Promote and uphold the company's values to create an inclusive and collaborative workplace.
• Build and nurture a high-performing, globally integrated team.
• Have fun solving difficult problems at the intersection of artificial intelligence and cybersecurity.

Qualifications

Required Qualifications:

• 12-15 years of experience in Product based software, SaaS or similar companies including 5+ years management experience in managing 15+ member engineering team(s); preferably experience in Cybersecurity product engineering.

• Strong engineering track-record and deep technical knowledge, distributed systems, or cloud-native architectures.

• Experience with cloud-native technologies - Python, NoSQL databases, Elastic Search, Kafka, Docker, Kubernetes, AWS.

• Understanding of modern software development practices including microservices, cloud platforms, and agile methodologies.

• Experience mentoring & supporting people and teams with empathy & professionalism, particularly in fast-paced, innovation-driven environments.

• Experience planning, tracking, delivering and managing multiple projects in startup-like environments.

• Experience leading through others and hiring & setting up multiple teams for success in rapid iteration cycles.

• Experience working with Product Managers and UX Designers for requirement analysis and driving the engineering team to come up with solution approach and design for delivering AI-powered requirements.

• Track record of shaping product roadmaps in the short and medium term, particularly for customer-facing products.

Desired Qualifications:

• Cybersecurity Experience in Endpoint Detection and Response, Security Analyst workflows.

• Experience and knowledge in the areas of AI/ML engineering, Large Language Models (LLMs), and generative AI technologies.

• Knowledge of and experience with technical teams, cybersecurity, and AI/ML startups strongly preferred.

• Experience in working andcollaboratingwith global teams.

• Familiarity with data pipelines, vector databases, and AI model training and deployment.

• Understanding of cybersecurity domain knowledge and security operations.