Engineering Manager
Reporting to DOE
About Keka :
Keka HR is one of India's fastest-growing HRTech platforms, trusted by thousands of businesses across India, the GCC, and the United States. Built with an employee-first approach, Keka helps organisations manage HR, Payroll, Performance, and Employee Experience — seamlessly, at scale.
Our engineering team is in the middle of an ambitious transformation — raising the quality bar, accelerating delivery velocity, modernising our architecture, and embedding AI into everything we build. We're hiring leaders who don't just manage teams — they build systems that make teams better than they could be without them.
About the role:
As a Senior Engineering Manager at Keka, you will own the end-to-end delivery, quality, and people outcomes for one or more product squads. You'll lead 8–12 engineers — a mix of senior individual contributors and tech leads — and be accountable for what your teams ship, how they ship it, and whether the people on your team are growing.
You'll partner deeply with Product, Design, QA, and Architecture to translate business goals into engineering execution. You'll set the quality bar, drive delivery predictability, build a culture of ownership, and ensure every investment your team makes is connected to a measurable customer or business outcome.
This is not a project management role. We're looking for a leader with genuine technical depth who can hold the room during an architecture discussion, make hard trade-off calls with conviction, and earn the respect of senior engineers through judgment — not just authority.
Must have:
12–14 years of software engineering experience with at least 4 years in a people management role leading teams of 10+ engineers
Track record of owning delivery outcomes end-to-end — accountability for what shipped, its quality, and its business impact
Strong technical depth — can hold architecture discussions, review system designs, and earn the respect of senior engineers
Evidence of structured hiring, coaching, performance management, and talent development with measurable outcomes
Fluency with delivery metrics (sprint accuracy, cycle time, DORA metrics) and the ability to improve them without gaming them
Customer-first mindset — can articulate the business metrics your team has contributed to, not just engineering output
Experience with cloud-native architectures, distributed systems, and modern engineering practices (CI/CD, observability, IaC)
Active daily user of AI coding tools with a clear point of view on AI-augmented engineering workflows
Strong Plus :
Experience in B2B SaaS, HR tech, or enterprise product engineering at scale (multi-tenant, high availability)
Led an AI-first transformation — team-wide AI adoption, AI code quality tracking, LLM infrastructure (proxies, MCP servers, prompt libraries)
Experience managing managers or tech leads — multi-layer leadership with demonstrated scaling through others
Built and shipped internal developer platforms, tooling, or engineering standards that raised org-wide productivity
Experience in compliance-sensitive domains — GDPR, SOC2, multi-tenant security, PII data processing at scale
Strong executive communication — can present engineering strategy to senior leadership and translate business goals into technical roadmaps
Demonstrated growth mindset — can trace a direct line from specific past mistakes to how you operate today
why Join Keka:
Real Ownership — You won't be a process layer between product and engineers. You'll own outcomes, make hard calls, and see the direct impact of your decisions on customers and the business.
AI-First, Not AI-Adjacent — Every engineer at Keka uses AI tools daily. We're investing in LLM infrastructure, MCP servers, and agent frameworks. If you want to lead at the frontier of how engineering teams work, this is the place.
People-First Culture, Performance-First Standards — We believe high performance comes from systems, not heroics. From clarity, not pressure. From trust, not control.
Scale That Matters — Keka serves millions of employees across 8,000+ companies. Your engineering decisions will directly impact how people get paid and how organisations manage their most important asset.
Growth Trajectory — Keka is targeting 100% YoY growth. This isn't maintenance mode — it's a rocketship that needs great engineering leadership to fly safely at speed.
