Director, Engineering

About the role

A platform is only as strong as its pillars. Someone has to own each one — architecting it, setting the tests and observability bar, picking which battles to fight and which to defer, and leading the engineers who ship within it. That’s the Director, Engineering.

Your pillar could be the agent orchestration layer, the workflow runtime, the routing and optimisation engine, the TMS/WMS core, the integration fabric, or a new primitive we haven’t built yet. You pick up to two in conversation with us, then you own them.

This is not a role where you ship tickets from a sprint. It’s a role where you make the bets that determine whether Shipsy’s platform can handle the next 10x — of customers, shipments, and agents. You lead a small team (3–6 engineers), and the team’s work and yours are interwoven — you write code, you review code, and you hold the technical vision for what gets built next.

What you’ll own

• A pillar. One major area of the Shipsy platform. You own the technical direction, the architectural decisions, the interfaces it exposes, and the bar it’s held to.
• System design. When a problem crosses multiple pillars, you’re the engineer who sketches the design that ships. You reason about failure modes, latency budgets, data contracts, and operational cost before anyone writes a line of code.
• A small team. You lead 3–6 engineers — hiring them, running their design reviews, coaching them through tough debugging, and raising their bar on every code review. Their growth is your growth.
• Productising the FDE flywheel. Your pillar is where field-tested patterns become platform. You pair with Forward Deployed Engineers, read their code, and decide what belongs in the platform and what stays bespoke.
• Technical storytelling. You can explain why an architecture choice matters — to a junior engineer, to the CEO, and to a customer CIO. All three audiences, same clarity.
• Unblocking. You’re the engineer the team pages when something breaks that no one else knows how to fix. You don’t solve every bug — you make sure the team can.
• Scaling the engineering function. We’re going from 30 engineers to 100+ over the next two years. Directors define the patterns and playbooks that make that scale work.

Who we’re looking for

• 5–8 years of production engineering experience at a high-growth technology company — unicorn, scaled startup, or a top-tier big-tech team. You’ve seen a codebase grow from 20 engineers to 200 and know why most of the scars came from.
• Tier-1 education. IIT / NIT / BITS / equivalent, or a top international institution.
• You’ve owned a system at scale. Not “worked on a team that owned one” — you’ve been the person whose name was on the on-call rotation when it broke.
• Deep generalist. One area you’re world-class in (distributed systems, ML infra, databases, agent runtimes, etc.) and the range to credibly step into any adjacent area. No narrow single-domain specialists.
• AI-native operating model. You think in first principles about where AI changes the shape of a problem — not where to add a chat interface. You’ve built with Claude, GPT, and agent frameworks; you understand evals, tool use, and long-running orchestration.
• Taste in architecture. You can articulate why one design is better than another along cost, correctness, latency, and evolvability. You resist cleverness.
• Track record of making engineers better. The people you’ve worked with got materially sharper because of you — not just shipped more. Specific names, specific before-and-after.
• High agency and low ego. You can push back on a CEO in a design review and take feedback from a junior engineer in a code review. Both, on the same day.

Where the role sits

You own a pillar on the Core Platform team, based out of Gurugram. Your first pillar is agreed in the offer letter — we’re explicit about which bet you’re signing up for and how we’ll measure it in 12 months.

You report to the engineering leadership, with a direct line into the product and Forward Deployed Engineering leads. No manager layers between you and the strategic work. You’ll work side-by-side with Engagement Managers and FDEs when a customer need surfaces a gap in the platform — you’re the engineer who decides whether to fill it, work around it, or defer it.

Progression is deliberate. Director → Senior Director with an expanded pillar and larger team, or Director → founding engineer on a new product bet, or Director → VP Engineering as the function scales. We’re building the next ten years of the engineering org from this hire inwards — the technical leaders we need in 2030 are the ones we’re picking today.

About Shipsy

Shipsy is the AI-native System of Action for logistics — the operating layer behind some of the largest enterprise supply chains on earth.

Where we are going. Enterprise logistics still runs on spreadsheets, ERPs from the 1990s, and tribal knowledge. We are replacing all of that with an AI-native operating layer — one where intelligent agents plan, dispatch, settle, and resolve at global scale. Logistics is a multi-trillion-dollar industry that has not yet had its software revolution. We are building it.

The scale today: - 275+ enterprise customers across 30+ countries - 5 billion+ shipments processed annually - 240+ carrier integrations - 7 global offices — Gurugram · Bengaluru · Dubai · Riyadh · Sydney · Amsterdam · Singapore - 300+ team members

Who we run: Aramex (65 countries, 18,000+ drivers, $27M annual savings delivered) · Heineken (2M+ trips across 70+ countries) · LATAM Cargo (Latin America’s largest airline group, $12B+ annual revenue) · Qatar Post (powers mail to 200+ countries) · Post Luxembourg (50%+ market share, $5M+/year savings) · Teleport (80% of Southeast Asia’s air-logistics network) · plus Australia Post, DPD, Smiths News, Apollo Pharmacy, argenx, Flipkart Minutes, Swiggy Instamart, and hundreds more.

Backed by $35M+ in venture capital from Peak XV Partners, A91 Partners, Info Edge, and others. Featured in the Gartner Magic Quadrant. SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, and GDPR compliant. 99.7% uptime SLA.

Trajectory. 50x revenue growth since 2020. Building toward $100M ARR and a public listing.

We are still a startup. Our real scale-up began in 2020 — and we have grown 50x since. Early enough that every senior hire shapes the next decade of the business. You are not joining a steady-state organisation with everything figured out. You will build the playbook, lead the work, and own the outcome — with the speed and agency of a startup and the scale of customers most startups never touch.

If you want to be the engineer who owns a pillar of what a multi-billion-dollar logistics company actually runs on — not the engineer who manages a team shipping a feature nobody uses — this is the role.