Sr. Director – AI & Software Engineering

India |Data, Analytics & AI | Full-time| Hands-on technical leadership

Location - Bengaluru/Gurgaon/Noida/Pune/Mumbai/Chennai/Hyderabad

Straive is seeking a hands-on technology leader to serve as the senior technical authority for our AI, analytics, and software engineering solutions.

About the Role:

You will set technical direction, resolve complex engineering challenges, and move solutions from prototype to secure, scalable production. The role combines architecture and execution leadership including a mandate to improve enterprise AI economics through fit-for-purpose frontier, open-source, and smaller models.

This is not a conventional delivery-governance role. You will remain close to the technology, lead critical design and code reviews, mentor teams, and take accountability for high-stakes technical outcomes.

Key Responsibilities

1. Production-Grade Engineering

Own engineering standards across architecture, development, testing, deployment, security, observability, and documentation.
Ensure prototypes have a credible production path; introduce architecture and code reviews, automated testing, quality gates, and release-readiness checks.
Close gaps in scalability, performance, reliability, maintainability, and security from design through deployment.

2. AI Architecture and Economics

Define scalable, reliable, and cost-effective AI/GenAI architectures based on accuracy, cost, latency, privacy, and deployment needs.
Lead selection, evaluation, fine-tuning, optimization, and deployment of frontier, open-source, small, and domain-specific models.
Reduce operating cost through model routing, caching, quantization, batching, retrieval and prompt optimization; design robust RAG and agentic systems with evaluation, guardrails, monitoring, and human oversight.

3. Technical Architecture and Platforms

Serve as the final escalation point for complex architecture, performance, security, and deployment issues.
Guide modular applications, APIs, microservices, data pipelines, AI services, cloud infrastructure, and enterprise integrations.
Promote reusable components and strong cloud-native, CI/CD, observability, data governance, and secure-development practices.

4. Team Capability

Mentor architects, engineering leads, data scientists, and developers through design reviews, code reviews, and technical workshops.
Build independent problem-solving capability, identify skill gaps, and support targeted hiring and development.
Create a culture of engineering ownership, technical rigor, experimentation, and continuous improvement.

5. Client Solutioning and Innovation

Partner with commercial, consulting, and delivery teams on client workshops, proposals, due diligence, and solution design.
Assess feasibility, architecture, effort, risk, and operating cost; translate business problems into pragmatic technical roadmaps.
Develop reference architectures and accelerators that strengthen Straive's differentiation and delivery speed.

Required Experience and Qualifications

12–18 years across software engineering, architecture, data platforms, AI/ML, or related roles, including experience in a startup, product company, or similarly fast-moving environment.
Proven ownership of enterprise-grade software, data, or AI products from architecture through production adoption.
Strong hands-on engineering background, preferably in Python and modern backend/frontend technologies.
Practical GenAI experience spanning RAG, vector search, agentic workflows, model evaluation, safety controls, and production monitoring.
Strong command of distributed systems, APIs, microservices, cloud-native architecture, enterprise integration, and at least one major cloud platform.
Working knowledge of containers, Kubernetes, CI/CD, infrastructure automation, observability, secure development, and modern data platforms.
Demonstrated ability to improve solution cost, latency, scalability, reliability, and engineering quality.
Experience mentoring senior technical professionals and communicating complex decisions to business and client leaders.

Preferred Experience

Multi-tenant platforms, reusable AI accelerators, MLOps/LLMOps, model governance, or regulated and security-sensitive environments.
Technical pre-sales, client workshops, proposals, solution estimation, and technical due diligence.
A track record of taking multiple AI or software products from concept to sustained production use.

Leadership Profile

Hands-on and accountable: Stays close to code and architecture and drives critical issues to resolution.
Commercially pragmatic: Balances technical ambition with client value, speed, maintainability, and cost.
Constructive challenger: Identifies weaknesses early, challenges assumptions, and raises engineering standards.
Capability builder: Develops strong, independent teams rather than becoming the sole source of expertise.

Why Join Straive

You will shape how enterprise-grade AI solutions are architected, built, and scaled with the mandate to influence technical strategy, strengthen engineering practices, develop high-performing teams, and deliver differentiated solutions for global clients.

Senior Director