AD- Engineering

About us:

At Cashfree Payments, we’re not just shaping the future of payments—we’re moving fast to scale businesses at every stage, with deep expertise in powering India’s D2C and e-commerce growth.

Founded in 2015, we process transactions worth $80B annually and are trusted by more than 800,000 businesses. Authorised by the Reserve Bank of India, we are one of the first entities to receive critical licences like PA-PG, PA-CB and PPI in the sector. We enable seamless collections, payouts, identity verification, and fraud detection.

We are backed by Silicon Valley investor Y Combinator, Apis Partners, Krafton Inc, State Bank of India (SBI), and were incubated by PayPal.

Associate Director – Engineering (12+ Years Experience)

Role Overview

As an Associate Director of Engineering, you will drive technology vision, execution excellence, and organizational capability for a business unit. You will operate at the intersection of strategy and delivery—shaping architecture, scaling teams, and ensuring high-quality product outcomes aligned with business goals.

Key Responsibilities

→ Technology Strategy & Architecture

→ Define and own the technology roadmap for multiple products or platforms within the business unit, ensuring alignment with the organization’s long-term technology vision.

→ Govern architectural decisions across systems, ensuring scalability, reliability, security, and cost efficiency.

→ Evaluate and introduce emerging technologies to drive innovation and competitive advantage.

→ Execution & Delivery Excellence

→ Oversee end-to-end product delivery, ensuring high-quality releases within defined timelines.

→ Establish and optimize engineering processes, development standards, and best practices to improve productivity and predictability.

→ Drive data-informed decision-making using engineering metrics (velocity, quality, reliability, cost).

→ Leadership & Talent Development

→ Build, lead, and scale high-performing engineering teams, including Engineering Managers and senior technical leaders.

→ Identify skill gaps and implement structured learning, upskilling, and leadership development programs.

→ Mentor Engineering Managers and senior engineers to enhance technical depth and leadership capability.

→ Cross-functional Collaboration

→ Partner with Product, QA, UX, Operations, and Business stakeholders to ensure effective planning, staffing, and execution of initiatives.

→ Communicate technical strategy and trade-offs clearly to executive and non-technical stakeholders.

→ Align engineering priorities with business outcomes, customer needs, and operational goals.

Core Requirements

→ Strong expertise in designing and scaling distributed systems, microservices architectures, and event-driven systems.

→ Deep experience with Java ecosystem (e.g., Spring Boot, Hibernate, JPA) and modern backend development practices.

→ Solid understanding of data architectures, including relational databases and NoSQL/document stores.

→ Product Thinking: Uncover the why,challenge assumptions and turn ambiguity into simple, high-impact solutions that translate intent into action.

→ Innovation: Challenge the status quo, simplify complexity, embrace new technologies, and turn curiosity → experiment → insight → solution into elegant, reliable, scalable systems that create lasting value.

→ AI Engineering: Build practical expertise in AI, LLMs, agents, automation, and emerging technologies to transform engineering workflows with context-aware, evidence-based, reliable, validated, and safely controlled AI solutions.

→ Proven ability in object-oriented design, system design, and architectural patterns.

→ Good understanding of web and mobile technology stacks.

→ Strong grasp of non-functional requirements and the ability to make pragmatic trade-offs.

→ Experience with CI/CD pipelines, DevOps practices, and automated testing frameworks.

→ Hands-on familiarity with agile methodologies and modern software development practices.

→ Experience managing and operating large-scale production systems.

Experience & Qualifications

→ 12+ years of experience in software engineering, with a significant portion in leadership roles managing teams and large-scale systems.

→ Proven track record of delivering complex software products from inception to launch and scaling them in production.

→ Experience leading multiple teams or large engineering groups in a fast-paced environment.

→ Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or a related field.