Vice President, Software Engineering

Job PurposeThe Vice President of Software Engineering, India is the most senior technology leader in Cendyn India and is accountable for building and operating Cendyn's India engineering organization as a strategic, product-owning center of excellence. This role is explicitly not a back-office delivery or staff-augmentation function — it is a full engineering leadership role with end-to-end ownership of meaningful product areas across the Cendyn portfolio.This is a hands-on technical leadership role. The VP is expected to be deeply engaged in architecture, design, code quality, and incident response, while leading a team of Engineering Managers and Senior Engineering Managers and the engineers reporting to them. The VP is not expected to perform day-to-day implementation work, but is expected to read code, lead architectural decisions, debug hard production problems alongside their teams, and personally own technical strategy documents.The VP partners closely with the CTO, engineering leaders in the US and EMEA, Product Management, and the executive leadership team to deliver against Cendyn's enterprise technology strategy, including its multi-product platform agenda and its enterprise AI agenda.Scope and ReportingReports to: Chief Technology Officer.Site leader for Cendyn India engineering: accountable for the engineering health, output, and culture of the entire India software engineering organization across multiple product lines.Direct reports include Senior Engineering Managers and Engineering Managers; full org of approximately 100–150 engineers today, with planned growth.Owns end-to-end engineering responsibility for designated product areas, partnering with Product Management on roadmap, prioritization, and delivery.Member of Cendyn's global engineering leadership team and the senior in-country leader for India.Represents Cendyn India to internal executives, strategic customers, partners, and Indian regulators or industry bodies as required.Essential Functions And ResponsibilitiesHands-On Technical LeadershipSet and enforce engineering standards (architecture, design, coding standards, testing, code review, observability) for India-led product areas, in alignment with Cendyn's enterprise architecture standards.Lead architectural decisions on India-owned systems; author or co-author technical strategy and architecture documents for major initiatives.Personally engage in design reviews, code review on critical-path changes, post-incident reviews, and the resolution of severe production issues.Drive a sustained reduction in technical debt, including modernization of legacy components inherited from acquisitions, balancing customer impact, cost, and risk.Maintain enough technical depth to be credible to senior engineers — including hands-on familiarity with Cendyn's primary languages, cloud platforms, data stores, and CI/CD tooling — without becoming a full-time individual contributor.Champion modern engineering practice: trunk-based development, continuous integration, automated testing, infrastructure as code, and DORA-aligned metrics.Engineering Management (Manager of Managers)Lead, develop, and hold accountable a team of Engineering Managers and Senior Engineering Managers; build a strong manager bench at every level.Set clear performance expectations, run quarterly performance and calibration cycles, and make and defend hire/no-hire and performance management decisions.Coach managers on hiring, performance management, technical decision-making, conflict resolution, and stakeholder management.Drive an engineering operating cadence (planning, standups, reviews, retros, incident reviews) that is consistent with Cendyn's global cadence and works inside Indian working hours.Establish and continuously refine career ladders, promotion criteria, and growth paths for engineers and engineering managers in India, in lockstep with Cendyn's global frameworks.India Site LeadershipBuild and grow Cendyn India as a strategic, product-owning center of excellence, not as a cost-arbitrage outsourcing arm; expand the scope and seniority of work owned in India over time.Set the culture, leadership tone, and engineering identity of the India organization — high standards, ownership, customer focus, and pride in technical craft.Partner with HR/People, Talent Acquisition, Finance, Legal, and Facilities on hiring strategy, compensation philosophy, retention, immigration, office operations, and compliance with Indian labor and employment law.Own attrition aggressively: build a retention strategy specifically calibrated to the Indian tech labor market (compensation positioning, career growth, technical brand, manager quality, work environment).Represent Cendyn India to local industry bodies, universities, and the broader engineering community; build Cendyn's technical employer brand in India.Ensure compliance with Indian regulations including the Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act, applicable labor laws, statutory benefits, and any sector-specific obligations.AI and Modern Engineering Capability Build-outGrow Cendyn India's AI and ML engineering capability, in alignment with the CTO's enterprise AI strategy. This includes AI Product Engineering (LLM-powered features, RAG, agentic patterns, evaluation frameworks), MLOps (model deployment, monitoring, drift detection, retraining), and underlying data platform engineering.Drive adoption of AI-assisted engineering tooling within the India organization to lift productivity, with measurable, reported outcomes.Ensure AI features built or operated out of India meet Cendyn's standards for evaluation, safety, customer trust, and applicable AI regulation (EU AI Act, emerging Indian AI guidance, etc.).Identify and develop AI technical leaders within the India organization to anchor long-term capability.Cross-Region CollaborationPartner closely with engineering leaders in the US and EMEA to ensure that India is treated as a peer engineering site, not a downstream delivery shop.Establish operating norms — handoffs, on-call, design reviews, decision-making — that allow a 24-hour follow-the-sun engineering organization to function without burning out any region.Be a constructive advocate for India's working hours, holidays, and cultural context with US and EMEA peers, while expecting the India team to meet Cendyn's global standards for collaboration, responsiveness, and quality.Travel internationally on a periodic cadence to build and maintain relationships across regions and with strategic customers.Product, Customer, and Stakeholder PartnershipPartner with Product Management on roadmap, scoping, sequencing, and tradeoffs for India-led product areas.Engage directly with strategic customers as required: technical escalations, architecture discussions, executive sponsor moments.Partner with Customer Support and Customer Success on the customer-impact view of engineering quality, including incident communication and remediation commitments.Partner with Sales Engineering and Solutions Architecture on technical pre-sales support originated from India.Engineering Operations, Quality, and ReliabilityOwn customer-facing reliability for India-operated systems, including SLAs/SLOs, on-call rotations, observability, capacity planning, and disaster recovery.Establish and enforce a unified SDLC across India teams: secure coding, code review, automated testing, deployment automation, and release governance.Drive measurable improvement against DORA metrics and customer-reported defect rates.Own engineering budget for the India organization, including headcount plan, vendor and tooling spend, and cloud cost discipline.Security, Privacy, and ComplianceAccountable for the security posture of India-built and India-operated software, in partnership with Cendyn's enterprise security and compliance leadership.Ensure that India engineering meets requirements under SOC 2 Type II, PCI-DSS, ISO 27001, GDPR, CCPA, and the Indian DPDP Act.Champion security-by-design and privacy-by-design within India engineering teams; ensure secure coding training and audit readiness.ExperienceRequired Qualifications10+ years of software engineering experience, including 5+ years leading managers (i.e., as a manager-of-managers, Director, or VP).Demonstrated experience leading engineering organizations of 100+ engineers at a B2B SaaS or enterprise software company.Demonstrated experience operating as a senior site leader for an India engineering center of a global company, ideally one where India is treated as a strategic capability rather than a delivery shop.Track record of shipping production cloud-native, multi-tenant SaaS at meaningful scale, with direct accountability for reliability and customer outcomes.Demonstrated success building, scaling, and retaining engineering organizations in the Indian tech labor market, including hiring senior engineers and managers in a competitive environment.Hands-on technical credibility: comfortable in code reviews, architecture discussions, incident response, and technical interviews; respected by senior engineers as a technical peer, not just a manager.Demonstrated experience partnering with US- and/or Europe-based product, engineering, and executive leadership across time zones.Technical DepthModern cloud-native, distributed-systems, multi-tenant SaaS architecture (AWS, Azure, or GCP).Strong fluency in at least one major backend stack used in production B2B SaaS, plus working familiarity with associated data, messaging, and observability ecosystems.Modern engineering practice: trunk-based development, CI/CD, automated testing at scale, infrastructure as code, observability, and DORA metrics.Working understanding of AI/ML systems in production, including LLM application architecture, RAG, MLOps, and AI cost/performance tradeoffs; depth in AI is preferred.Application and infrastructure security and compliance frameworks (SOC 2, PCI-DSS, GDPR, DPDP).Leadership and BehavioralProven ability to attract, develop, and retain senior engineering managers and principal-level engineers in India.Strong written and verbal English communication; comfortable presenting to a CEO, CTO, executive team, and customers.High ownership and bias to action; willing to make and defend unpopular decisions when warranted.Cross-cultural fluency; experienced and effective in working with US and European leadership and customers.Coaching and developing leaders is a clear personal strength, not a chore.Bias toward measurable outcomes; track record of using data and KPIs to manage engineering functions.EducationBachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related discipline required.Master's degree preferred but not required if demonstrated experience is exceptional.Preferred QualificationsPrior VP- or senior Director-level engineering leadership in hospitality, travel, hotel distribution, or guest engagement technology.Direct experience growing an India engineering site from sub-100 to 200+ engineers, including building out the manager bench.Prior experience integrating engineering teams from acquired companies into a single operating model.Prior experience leading or growing AI/ML engineering capability in a production B2B SaaS context.Active presence in the Indian engineering community (speaking, mentoring, university engagement) supporting employer brand.Work EnvironmentThis role is based in India and requires a regular on-site presence at the Cendyn Hyderabad office to lead the team, support new joiners, and build culture. Cendyn operates a hybrid work model; the specific on-site cadence will be agreed with the CTO and reviewed against organizational needs.Standard business hours are aligned to Indian working hours, with the explicit understanding that the role requires regular evening engagement to overlap with US and EMEA peers and customers. Weekend or off-hours engagement may be required during major incidents, releases, or customer escalations.TravelThis role requires periodic international travel to Cendyn locations in the US and EMEA, and to strategic customer sites and industry events. Domestic travel within India may also be required.EEO StatementCendyn provides equal employment opportunities (EEO) to all employees and applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability or genetics. In addition to federal law requirements, Cendyn complies with applicable state and local laws governing nondiscrimination in employment in every location in which the company has facilities. This policy applies to all terms and conditions of employment, including recruiting, hiring, placement, promotion, termination, layoff, recall, transfer, leaves of absence, compensation and training.Cendyn expressly prohibits any form of workplace harassment based on race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, age, genetic information, disability, or veteran status. Improper interference with the ability of Cendyn’s employees to perform their job duties may result in discipline up to and including discharge.Other DutiesPlease note this job description is not designed to cover or contain a comprehensive listing of activities, duties or responsibilities that are required of the employee for this job. Duties, responsibilities and activities may change at any time with or without notice.