Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
This Director of Engineering role stands out in the SaaS ecosystem because it sits at the intersection of platform engineering and marketplace mechanics—two areas where product outcomes are tightly coupled to system design. Owning employer and candidate journeys implies responsibility for multi-sided workflows, where latency, trust signals, and conversion paths are as critical as feature delivery. The stated Go + GCP foundation also signals a cloud-native, service-oriented environment where architectural choices directly influence iteration speed and reliability.
From a SaaS career perspective, the role offers durable exposure to the problems that recur across scaled subscription and usage-driven products: defining service boundaries, managing data contracts, and operationalising SLIs/SLOs and incident response. The emphasis on funnels, experimentation, and marketplace health metrics builds fluency in data-informed engineering leadership—useful across product-led growth, monetisation surfaces, and platform teams. Partnership with Product, Data/ML, and Business also develops the cross-functional operating model common in mature SaaS orgs.
This position is best suited to an engineering leader who can balance hands-on technical judgment with multi-team execution, and who enjoys translating ambiguous product goals into stable systems. It fits someone comfortable leading managers, aligning pods around measurable outcomes, and making trade-offs across performance, security, and cost in a cloud environment.
The section above is editorial commentary from The SaaS Jobs, provided to help SaaS professionals understand the role in a broader industry context.
Job Description
Location: Bengaluru (WFO - Onsite)
Function: Engineering
Reports to: Head Of Engineering / CTO
Role Summary
We’re looking for a Director of Engineering to lead the Engineering team and efforts for Marketplace Business at Apna – owning end-to-end journeys for both employers and candidates. You’ll drive strategy, architecture, and execution across multiple pods building job discovery, matching, and conversion on top of our Go + GCP stack.
You’ll work closely with Product, Data, Design, Analytics and Business to build a high-liquidity, high-trust jobs marketplace at scale.
Key Responsibilities
- Lead Marketplace Pods (Employer + Candidate)
- Own the engineering roadmap for all marketplace pods: employer funnels (posting → hires) and candidate funnels (discovery → apply → hire).
- Ensure pods are mission-aligned, autonomous, and deliver outcomes tied to marketplace health (fill-rate, time-to-hire, retention).
- Drive strong collaboration between PMs, EMs, tech leads, and data within each pod.
- Technical Strategy on Go + GCP
- Set the technical direction for Go-based microservices running on GCP (GKE, Pub/Sub, Cloud SQL/Spanner, etc.).
- Define service boundaries, APIs, and data contracts that allow pods to move fast without breaking each other.
- Champion best practices in performance, reliability, security, and cost efficiency on GCP.
- Architecture & Scale
- Own architecture for search, recommendations, ranking/matching, eligibility, and billing/workflows across the marketplace.
- Ensure systems are highly available, low latency, and horizontally scalable for millions of users.
- Partner with Data/ML teams to productionize models (ranking, fraud/abuse, quality scoring) within Go services.
- Execution & Engineering Excellence
- Lead and grow Engineering Managers and senior Go engineers across multiple pods.
- Implement strong delivery practices: OKRs, roadmap planning, design/code reviews, SLIs/SLOs, on-call, and incident management.
- Balance experimentation (A/B tests) with platform stability and technical debt management.
- Stakeholder & People Leadership
- Partner with the Head of Product, Business, and Operations to translate marketplace strategy into clear technical plans.
- Represent marketplace engineering in leadership reviews with clear narratives on trade-offs and progress.
- Build a culture of ownership, speed with quality, and data-driven decisions; define career paths and growth for EMs and ICs.
What We’re Looking For
- Must-Have
- 10–15+ years of experience in software engineering, with 5+ years leading managers and multi-pod / multi-team orgs.
- Experience owning a two-sided marketplace or large-scale consumer/B2B2C product.
- Strong hands-on background in Go and cloud-native architectures on GCP (or similar, with willingness to go deep on GCP).
- Proven track record of shipping distributed systems / microservices at scale.
- Comfort with experimentation and data: funnels, cohorts, A/B testing, marketplace health metrics.
- Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills.
- Nice-to-Have
- Experience with search, recommendations, ranking, or ads-like systems.
- Prior work in India-focused high-growth startups.
- Exposure to React / React Native frontends and mobile-heavy products.
