Software Engineering Manager - Java Full Stack - Open Banking

Key Responsibilities

1. Global Engineering Leadership & India Expansion

• Lead and scale a high-performing global engineering organization, including building and expanding the India team supporting Acquisition and Open Banking platforms.

• Establish a strong engineering culture focused on ownership, quality, innovation, and continuous improvement.

• Drive talent strategy across hiring, onboarding, mentoring, performance management, and succession planning.

• Foster an inclusive, accountable environment that promotes collaboration, technical excellence, and leadership growth.

2. Platform Engineering & Architecture (Acquisition & Underwriting)

• Own the design and evolution of API-first, event-driven platforms enabling digital acquisition and real-time underwriting.

• Architect decoupled systems separating customer journeys, decisioning, and core banking platforms to improve scalability and agility.

• Establish reusable platform capabilities (decisioning, identity, fraud, KYC, and data integration) consumable across products, channels, and partners.

• Drive engineering excellence in distributed systems, scalability, and secure Open Banking integrations.

3. Execution, Delivery & Operational Performance

• Lead delivery of the product and platform roadmap with clear accountability for business outcomes, quality, and operational stability.

• Ensure predictable, on-time, and within-budget execution while meeting security, compliance, and reliability standards.

• Promote strong engineering practices, including high-quality code, sound design decisions, and production stability.

• Proactively manage dependencies, risks, and trade-offs, ensuring alignment with organizational priorities and strategic goals.

4. Technical Leadership & Architectural Governance

• Provide strategic architectural direction, aligning solutions to business needs, enterprise standards, and regulatory requirements.

• Ensure designs are scalable, resilient, maintainable, and testable, with clear handling of dependencies and failure scenarios.

• Lead architecture reviews and design forums, driving consistency and simplification across platforms.

• Continuously simplify systems to improve speed, reliability, and supportability.

5. Cross-Functional Strategy & Stakeholder Engagement

• Partner with product, business, risk, and architecture leaders to define and deliver acquisition and underwriting capabilities.

• Influence roadmap decisions by balancing engineering strategy, customer experience, risk, and delivery constraints.

• Drive alignment across teams to enable efficient, end-to-end value delivery across the ecosystem.

• Communicate architecture, strategy, and delivery risks clearly to both technical and executive stakeholders.

6. Resiliency, Risk & Operational Excellence

• Define and enforce resiliency standards (tiering, SLOs, failover strategies) for mission-critical acquisition and underwriting flows.

• Ensure high availability and low-latency performance for real-time decisioning systems.

• Lead incident management, root cause analysis, and continuous reliability improvements across the platform.

Technical Scope

The Senior Software Engineering Manager is expected to bring strong hands-on technical leadership and credibility in designing and delivering modern, distributed, and scalable platforms. This role leads engineering teams building API-first acquisition and Open Banking solutions, with a focus on real-time decisioning, resiliency, performance, and regulatory compliance.

Core Technical Expectations

• Design and build highly scalable, resilient, and maintainable distributed systems, with a strong emphasis on modularity, extensibility, and testability.

• Lead development of microservices, APIs, SDKs, and front-end components (MFE) using Java, Spring Boot, and modern UI frameworks aligned to API-driven architectures.

• Architect low-latency, high-throughput platforms to support real-time acquisition flows and credit decisioning workloads.

• Enable seamless integration across channels and partners through well-defined RESTful APIs and event-driven communication patterns.

• Apply event-driven architecture principles using Kafka and related streaming technologies to support asynchronous processing and real-time data flows.

• Leverage cloud-native and container-based platforms, including Kubernetes, Istio, Rancher, and API gateways (Apigee), to enable scalability, observability, and secure service communication

• Establish modern DevOps and CI/CD practices using tools such as Jenkins/CloudBees and GitLab, ensuring automated testing, deployment, and release management.

• Enforce best practices in source control, code quality, and agile delivery, driving consistency, speed, and reliability across engineering teams.

• Lead troubleshooting and resolution of complex production issues, ensuring rapid recovery, root cause analysis, and continuous system improvement.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.

• 10+ years of experience designing and delivering modern, distributed software systems.

• 5+ years of experience leading high-performing engineering teams, including globally distributed/offshore teams.

• Proven expertise building and scaling platform-based solutions with measurable business impact.

• Demonstrated ability to lead teams in delivering complex, multi-stakeholder products in fast-paced, enterprise environments.

• Strong understanding of software engineering practices, architecture patterns, and enterprise development tools.

• Ability to translate business strategy into technology and engineering outcomes, driving alignment across product, risk, and engineering.

• Strong analytical, planning, leadership, and communication skills, with the ability to influence across technical and non-technical audiences.

• Proven ability to collaborate effectively with engineers, product managers, scrum teams, business stakeholders, and external partners.

Preferred Qualifications

• Strong domain expertise in customer acquisition, credit underwriting, and Open Banking ecosystems.

• Experience in financial services or other highly regulated industries, with an understanding of risk, compliance, and security requirements.

• Advanced knowledge of distributed systems, microservices architecture, API platforms, and event-driven integration patterns.

• Experience leading modernization initiatives, including integrating new platforms with legacy systems in enterprise environments.

• Demonstrated ability to balance feature delivery, technical debt, and operational reliability at scale.

• Experience with cloud-native platforms and engineering ecosystems (Azure, containers, CI/CD, API management).

• Relevant certifications in Java, Spring, Microservices, or Cloud technologies are a plus.

Leadership Profile

The ideal candidate is a leader who:

• Thinks and operates at a platform and ecosystem level, considering impacts across domains, customer journeys, and partner integrations.

• Demonstrates deep understanding of end-to-end acquisition and underwriting flows, including users, systems, and business outcomes.

• Proactively addresses ambiguity, risks, and dependencies, guiding teams toward sound, data-driven decisions.

• Builds a culture of strong engineering fundamentals, including design patterns, coding standards, quality engineering, and accountability.

• Combines technical depth, strategic thinking, and disciplined execution to deliver consistent results.

• Effectively represents and scales global engineering teams, especially across India and U.S.-based stakeholders.