Director Engineering

VP Engineering – Jumeau Capital

Location: Bengaluru, India
Work Model: Hybrid
Experience: 10+ years in software engineering, including substantial engineering leadership experience
Founder: John Sutton

About Jumeau Capital

Jumeau Capital is building developer-focused API infrastructure designed to simplify API discovery, integration, usage-based billing and monetisation. The platform operates at significant scale, serving high-volume API traffic and supporting evolving developer and AI-agent ecosystems.

Role Overview

We are looking for a hands-on VP of Engineering to lead engineering strategy, architecture, execution and team development. The ideal candidate combines strong technical judgment with proven people-management experience and the ability to deliver reliable, scalable platforms.

This is a highly hands-on leadership role, with an expected balance of approximately 60% hands-on engineering and 40% leadership and management.

Key Responsibilities

1. Engineering Strategy and Architecture

• Own the engineering roadmap, platform architecture and technical direction.
• Design and scale high-throughput APIs, distributed systems, microservices and developer platforms.
• Drive reliability, availability, performance, security and infrastructure cost optimisation.
• Make sound architectural decisions aligned with business goals and product priorities.

2. Execution and Delivery

• Lead complex engineering initiatives from planning through production delivery.
• Establish continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) practices.
• Manage dependencies, technical risks, delivery timelines and production readiness.
• Take ownership of delivery challenges, resolve blockers and bring delayed or at-risk projects back on track.

3. Production Reliability and Problem-Solving

• Lead the diagnosis and resolution of critical production incidents.
• Establish effective monitoring, observability, alerting and incident-response processes.
• Conduct root-cause analyses and implement preventive measures.
• Balance immediate incident mitigation with long-term engineering improvements.

4. People Leadership and Team Building

• Build, hire and develop a high-performing engineering organisation.
• Own engineering hiring decisions, technical evaluation standards and team composition.
• Provide direct people management, coaching, performance feedback and career development.
• Address underperformance through clear expectations, structured feedback and measurable improvement plans.
• Remain technically hands-on while delegating effectively and developing future engineering leaders.

5. Business and Stakeholder Alignment

• Translate complex technical decisions into clear business implications.
• Explain architectural trade-offs involving scalability, reliability, cost, delivery speed and customer experience.
• Partner with founders, product and business stakeholders on priorities and execution.
• Communicate delivery progress, technical risks and production issues clearly and proactively.

Technical Requirements

• Strong hands-on software engineering experience in Node.js/TypeScript, Go, Python or Java.
• Proven experience building and operating high-volume APIs or developer platforms, ideally handling billions of API calls per month.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems, microservices, API gateways, caching, queues and asynchronous processing.
• Experience with AWS and cloud-native infrastructure, including relevant technologies such as EKS, Kafka/MSK or Kinesis, Aurora and Lambda.
• Demonstrated experience with CI/CD, automated testing, release management, observability and production operations.
• Ability to review code, guide implementation and make architecture-level decisions while remaining hands-on.

Preferred Experience

• Payments, billing, metering, usage-based pricing or monetisation platforms.
• Data platforms, data ingestion, streaming and large-scale data pipelines.
• AI-agent infrastructure, LLM integrations or developer tooling for AI applications.
• Experience improving platform reliability, scalability and infrastructure economics.

Leadership Expectations and Screening Criteria

Candidates will be evaluated on specific examples and demonstrated outcomes rather than general leadership statements.

Execution: Describe a difficult project delivered personally. Clarify individual ownership, what went wrong, actions taken to recover delivery, and measurable outcomes.

Problem-solving: Explain a significant production issue, including diagnosis, immediate mitigation, stakeholder communication, root cause and preventive actions.

Communication: Demonstrate the ability to explain a complex technical decision, the alternatives considered, business impact and trade-offs.

People leadership: Provide evidence of hiring strong engineers, managing underperformance, developing teams and exercising direct people-management responsibility—not solely technical leadership.

Hands-on capability: Demonstrate recent coding, architecture, debugging or production engineering contributions consistent with the expected 60% hands-on involvement.

Scale and reliability: Explain the actual traffic volume, architecture, performance constraints, availability targets and operational challenges of systems previously owned.

Candidates should be able to go beyond prepared answers, offering concrete details, individual contributions, metrics, decisions and lessons learned.

Location and Availability

• Must be based in Bengaluru or willing to relocate.
• Must be open to the agreed hybrid working arrangement in Bengaluru.
• Compensation expectations must align with the approved budget.
• Notice period and realistic joining availability must be confirmed during screening.

Success Measures

• Reliable and scalable platform performance at high API volumes.
• Predictable delivery through effective engineering execution and CI/CD.
• Reduced production incidents, faster recovery and improved operational maturity.
• A strong engineering organisation with effective hiring and people management.
• Improved infrastructure efficiency and commercially sound technical decisions.
• Continued hands-on technical contribution alongside effective leadership.

Reporting and Stakeholder Alignment

The role is expected to work closely with the founder and business leadership. The precise reporting line, team size, hiring plan and decision-making authority should be confirmed with the hiring team.