Position Title- Director of Technology Operations Department- Technology & Engineering Leadership Reporting To- Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Location- Bhubaneswar Employment Type- Full-Time Company Overview :- iServeU is a modern banking infrastructure provider in APAC region, empowering financial enterprises with embedded fintech solutions for their customers. iServeU is one of the few certified partners with National Payment Corporation of India (NPCI), VISA for various products. iServeU also provides a cloud-native, micro services-enabled, distributed platform with over 5000 possible product configurations with a low code/no code interface to banks, NBFCs, Fintech, and other regulated entities. • We process around 2500 transactions per second by levering distributed & auto scale technology like K8. • Our core platform combines of 1200+ micro services. • Our customer list includes Fintech start-ups, top tier private banks to PSU bank. We operate in five countries and help customers constantly change the way financial institutions operate and innovate. • Our solutions currently empowers over 20 banks and 250+ enterprises across India and abroad. • Our platform seamlessly manages the entire transaction lifecycle, including withdrawals, deposits, transfers, payments, and lending through various channels like digital, branch, agents. Our team of 500+ employees, with over 80% in technology roles is spread across offices in Bhubaneswar, Bangalore and Delhi. We have raised $8 million in funding to support our growth and innovation. For more details visit: www.iserveu.in Role Overview :- As the Chief of Staff (CoS) to the CTO, you will serve as the strategic partner, operational anchor, and ultimate force multiplier for our technology leadership team. Operating within a high-throughput, low latency digital payments and banking infrastructure ecosystem, the CTO office must flawlessly balance continuous product innovation with near-zero-tolerance reliability, strict regulatory compliance, and bulletproof security. This is not an administrative or purely corporate strategy role. You are a seasoned technologist who has traded daily IDE coding for organizational engineering. You will own the operational machinery of the technology department—translating the CTO’s long-term vision into concrete execution frameworks, optimizing engineering output, resolving architectural bottlenecks, and cultivating a high performance culture across all engineering squads. Note on Technical Integrity: We build mission-critical financial frameworks. The individual in this position must possess deep architectural intuition combined with exceptional emotional intelligence to command respect and alignment from elite engineering teams. The Profile Blueprint: Who You Are 1. "In the Trenches" Engineering Pedigree We believe you cannot effectively guide an engineering organization if you have never lived its reality. You must have spent a significant portion of your early career working in the pits as a hands-on engineer, DevOps specialist, or systems architect. Key Attributes - Production-Tested Credibility: You have written production code, deployed microservices, managed critical API integrations, and actively participated in high-stakes on-call rotations. You know the exact visceral pressure of a P0 production incident down a core payment processing pipeline. - Technical Authority: Because you have broken and fixed production environments, you hold immediate respect with Principal Architects and Engineering Leads. You can confidently audit technical timelines, challenge structural assumptions, and see through defensive padding or jargon. - Architectural Intuition: While you won't be designing systems day-to-day, you understand distributed architectures, transaction routing matrices, database sharding, cloud resource constraints, and hardware security modules (HSMs). You can seamlessly participate in high-level architectural trade-off discussions. 2. Elite Man Management & Organizational Psychology While your past is rooted in systems, your present mastery is in people. You possess an elite capability to navigate human dynamics and lead highly opinionated, brilliant technical minds. Key Attributes - Influence Without Authority: The absolute core of this role. You will frequently align cross functional engineering squads, product teams, and security divisions toward unified goals without having them as direct reports. You lead through deep trust, radical transparency, and absolute objective alignment. - Managing High-Intellect Dynamics: You know how to mediate conflicts between competing technical architects, safely de-escalate "alpha" engineering personalities, and steer passionate debates toward clear, productive business compromises. - Cultural Sensor: You maintain an active pulse on the grassroots health of the organization. Because you speak the language of developers naturally, you can spot systemic burnout, process friction, or tool chain inefficiencies long before they trigger attrition. Core Responsibilities:- 1. Engineering Operations & Financial Governance The Operational Rhythm: Design, optimize, and run the technology department's governance infrastructure (Leadership stand-ups, Architecture Review Boards, Sprint Alignments, and Technology QBRs). Metric Frameworks: Maintain, track, and expose the absolute ground-truth KPIs of our tech stack: platform availability/uptime, transaction success rates, API latency percentiles, deployment velocities, and Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR). Financial Guardrails: Manage the engineering department's CapEx and OpEx budgets. Drive continuous cost-optimization frameworks across cloud infrastructure (AWS/Azure) and oversee high value vendor ecosystems (banking switches, networks, HSM modules). 2. Strategic Technical Initiatives & Firefighting Own the Ambiguous: Take direct command of high-impact, cross-functional engineering initiatives that do not naturally fall under a single product squad (e.g., core payment hub migrations, deep infrastructure overhauls, or data localization setups). Compliance Integration: Serve as the strategic bridge between the CTO office and the CISO/Compliance teams to guarantee that all architectural evolution natively comply with PCI-DSS, local digital payment guidelines, and security governance frameworks. 3. High-Stakes Executive Communication The CTO Proxy: Step in as an authoritative proxy for the CTO in critical internal alignments and stakeholder reviews, ensuring technical constraints are perfectly understood by business units. Technical Narrative Crafting: Translate incredibly granular, low-level technical trade-offs and infrastructure requirements into high-level, impact-driven strategic narratives for the CEO, Board of Directors, and external regulatory bodies. Success Metrics (12-Month Success Matrix) Timeline Core Objectives & Deliverables First 90 Days Map out all hidden process friction across engineering squads; assume full command of the leadership operational cadence; establish a clean, undisputed dashboard of core payment infrastructure metrics. First 6 Months Standardize a predictable cross-team dependency mapping framework for major payment hub updates; identify and execute a minimum 15% optimization in infrastructure/vendor spend without impacting performance. First Year Successfully offload 25-30% of the CTO's operational and administrative load, allowing them to shift focus entirely onto long- term architectural innovation and market-defining tech strategies. Requirements Candidate Qualifications:- Fintech/Payments Experience: Minimum 5–8 years of professional experience, ideally within a high growth FinTech, digital payments, core banking, or high-transaction SaaS platform ecosystem. Technical Background: Proven past experience as a Software Engineer, Systems Architect, or Technical Program Manager. Strong comprehension of APIs, distributed ledgers, microservices, and payment primitives is mandatory. Leadership Record: Demonstrated experience managing tech operations, resource planning, budgeting, or leading cross-functional task forces. Experience coaching and mentoring engineering leads is highly valued. Education: Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical domain. An MBA or equivalent business acumen is a strong plus but secondary to proven technical operational competence.
