Function: Engineering – Internal Tools & Infrastructure

Designation: Head – Software Delivery

Reports To: Vishnu Teja, Co-Founder

Location: Hyderabad (Corporate HQ)

Position Type: Full-time | Leadership | Engineering

Team Size: 16-20

Seats Open: 1

About Keus

Keus is at the forefront of integrating elegant design with state-of-the-art technology in smart home automation and architectural lighting. Our mission is to transcend ordinary living, offering a luxurious smart home experience that is seamless and beyond compare.

Our philosophy is centered around a design-first approach, where impeccable aesthetics meet unparalleled functionality. At Keus, a cadre of leading Industrial Designers, Electronics and Electrical Engineers, as well as Software Architects, merge their expertise to redefine industry standards and craft bespoke smart home products and solutions that lead the way in innovation.

We pride ourselves on being the benchmark of sophistication and holistic smart home experiences in India, relentlessly innovating to not only meet but redefine global standards.

Keus is on an ambitious path of expansion, with 2027 marking our entry into the thriving markets of Mumbai, Bangalore, Delhi and Pune. Our strategy involves directly engaging with Architects, Interior Designers, and leveraging Digital Marketing to enhance our customer reach.

Discover more about our vision and offerings:

- Visit our website: www.keus.in
- Watch us on YouTube: KeusSmartHome
- Follow us on Instagram: @keussmarthome

Join us in shaping the future of luxurious Smart living.

Position Overview:

We are seeking a Head – Software Delivery to own Internal Tools and Infrastructure, the systems every other engineering team build, tests, and ships on. Eight people report into you today, four of them seats you will hire yourself, and one of them lead running Infrastructure.

Your teams have no direct customers. Their output is the throughput of everyone else.

As Head - Software Delivery, you are also accountable for how predictably and safely software moves from commit to the devices in our customers’ homes — the release cadence, release quality, and engineering health of KEUS as a whole, not only the two teams you run directly.

Key Responsibilities:

A. Leading the Team

- Run a team of 5–10 engineers, including a lead who reports to you. You manage Infrastructure through that lead rather than around them.
- Hire four engineers into open seats, then make them productive: onboarding, review standards, and the first six months of their growth.
- Set direction and hold it. Own the roadmap for both teams, decline work that does not serve it, and explain the reasoning rather than asserting it.
- Raise the floor with tooling. Choose and build the frameworks, libraries, and internal services that make the other teams faster and their systems more reliable. This is the main lever your role has on org-wide throughput, and it is the reason Internal Tools exists.
- Give feedback close to the event, in both directions. Performance conversations are yours to have, not to escalate.
- Stay technical enough to be trusted. Read the code, review the changes that carry risk, and take a shift yourself when something is broken.
- Absorb the interruptions. Four other teams depend on you. Shielding your engineers from that queue is part of the job.
- Say the unwelcome thing early: a date that will slip, an architecture call going wrong, someone struggling. Late clarity is the expensive kind.
- Build the second line. Develop the Infrastructure lead and a future Internal Tools lead so that both teams run without depending on you day to day.

B. Software Delivery Governance

- Own the release train. Set the org-wide release calendar and cadence across mobile, web, cloud, and device firmware, with explicit release-readiness, go/no-go, and rollback criteria.
- Manage cross-team dependencies. Work with Product, Hardware/Firmware, QA, and Manufacturing so that dates committed to Sales and customers are dates that hold.
- Measure delivery health. Track DORA metrics (deployment frequency, lead time for changes, change failure rate, time to restore) and report them to leadership on a fixed cadence.
- Run incidents properly. Own the incident process and blameless post-mortems; every Sev-1 ends with a tracked corrective action and an owner.
- Own the engineering infrastructure budget. Cloud spend, tooling and AI licences, and vendors — reviewed quarterly against usage and value.

C. Technical Depth We Expect





- Delivery pipeline. CI/CD and release engineering built and operated rather than inherited. You know what makes a pipeline fast, and what makes a release reversible.
- Container and cloud systems. Container orchestration in production, cloud infrastructure including its cost model, and a clear view of what to run versus what to buy.
- Operability. Observability (metrics, logs, traces) and feature flag systems treated as part of shipping, not as instrumentation added after an incident.
- Debugging and architecture. The others bring the hard bug to. Deep debugging across processes, network, and device boundaries, and strong instincts for code architecture that survives contact with a growing team.
- Languages in depth. Fluent in several, with a considered view of what each is genuinely good for and why you would pick one over another for a given problem here.
- Application structure. How mobile and web applications are actually put together: build and release cycles, state management, API boundaries, and what makes each hard to operate once shipped.
- Web frontend, at least in principle. Enough to reason for a frontend change, review it, and hold your end of a design discussion. Depth here is welcome but not required.

D. Security and Data

Connected devices sit inside customers’ homes, so a security gap here is not an abstract risk. We expect this to be something you own by instinct, not something QA catches for you.

- End-to-end, not point-by-point. You can reason about security across the whole path — device, network, backend, client — and see where a design leaves a gap, rather than waiting for a pentest to name it.
- Data security is explicit. What is collected, where it is stored, who can reach it, and how long it is kept are decisions you make and write down, not properties that emerge from whatever the code happens to do.
- Secure defaults in the pipeline. Secrets handling, dependency and image scanning, and least privilege access built into the path teams already use, not a separate checklist somebody remembers.
- Debugging access is a security surface. Anything that lets an engineer inspect a live system is also a route to production data. You design that access scoped, audited, and revocable from the start.
- Compliance is designed in. Partner with Legal so that how we handle customer and household data meets the Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act, 2023 and our contractual commitments.

E. Working AI-First

You set how your teams use AI, which is a leadership problem before it is a technical one.

- Own the team-wide setup. Standardise Claude and Cursor across engineering — shared plugins, MCP servers, and configuration checked in and versioned — so every engineer starts with the same capability instead of assembling their own.
- Make realtime systems safely inspectable. Build the tooling that lets an engineer debug a running system through those tools without degrading it: read-only by default, sampled rather than firehosed, scoped to what that person may see, and audited. Convenient access to production is exactly where debugging tooling turns into a breach.
- Decide what gets delegated to agents, what a human reviews line by line, and what AI does not touch, then write it down rather than leaving each engineer to guess.
- Keep code review as the quality gate. Volume rises when a team works this way; the bar cannot come down to meet it.
- Build the tooling that makes this safe here: fast tests, reproducible environments, and deploys that are cheap to reverse.
- Judge adoption by whether it moves delivery, not by usage. If a workflow is not helping, say so and drop it.

F. Stakeholder Management & Cross-functional Collaboration

- Represent engineering delivery in leadership reviews: what shipped, what slipped, why, and what changes.
- Work with Product and Hardware leadership to turn roadmaps into realistic, sequenced delivery plans.
- Partner with Service and Customer Support so that field issues and escalations become engineering priorities with clear owners and timelines.




- Keep Sales informed of feature availability and release timelines they can confidently commit to customers.

Key Deliverables

- All four open seats hired and productive within six months of joining.
- A predictable release calendar, with committed release dates consistently met.
- Faster, reversible releases: measurable improvement in lead time for changes and change failure rate.
- Secure-by-default pipeline in place: secrets handling, dependency and image scanning, least-privilege access.
- Scoped, audited, and revocable production debugging access for every engineer.
- A standardised, versioned AI-first engineering setup adopted across all teams.
- Visible, controlled cloud and tooling spend against budget.
- A second line of leadership ready across Internal Tools and Infrastructure.

Key measures of success:

Delivery Speed

Delivery speed is tracked through Lead Time for Changes, which measures the time from commit to production and is reviewed as a trend against an established baseline.

Delivery Frequency

Delivery frequency is captured by Deployment Frequency, defined as the number of production releases per team per week.

Release Quality

Release quality is assessed using Change Failure Rate, the percentage of releases that cause an incident, hotfix, or rollback.

Reliability

Reliability is measured through Time to Restore, which is the average recovery time for Sev-1 and Sev-2 incidents.

Predictability

Predictability is monitored via Release Commitment Adherence, the percentage of committed releases that are delivered on the committed date.

Security

Security is evaluated through Vulnerability Closure, which looks at open critical and high findings along with the closure turnaround time (TAT) against the SLA.

Developer Productivity

Developer productivity is reflected in Internal Tools Adoption & Developer Experience, measured by the adoption of shared tooling and a quarterly developer survey.

Cost

Cost is managed through Cloud & Tooling Cost Efficiency, which compares spend against budget and tracks the cost trend per environment.

People Leadership

People leadership is gauged by Hiring & Team Health, measured by seats filled against plan, retention, and engagement.

Key Skills & Competencies:

- Engineering leadership: hiring, coaching, and performance management.
- Delivery management and release governance across multiple teams.
- Systems thinking across devices, network, backend, and client.
- Security-first judgement and data stewardship.
- Clear, early, and candid communication with engineers and leadership.
- Data-driven decision-making using delivery and reliability metrics.
- Commercial awareness: build-versus-buy and cost-conscious infrastructure choices.
- Hands-on, practical command of AI-assisted development.

Qualifications:

- Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field.
- 12–16 years of experience in software engineering, including at least 4 years leading engineering teams.
- Several years building and operating production systems, with real ownership of infrastructure or developer tooling.
- Experience leading 5–10 engineers, including hiring and performance conversations, not technical direction alone.
- Experience leading through other leads (managing managers) and owning delivery across more than one team.
- Security judgement you can demonstrate: talk us through how you would attack a system you built, and what you changed once you had.
- Opinions about AI-assisted development that come from having done it and seen where it fails.
- Experience with IoT, connected devices, or consumer hardware products preferred.

Good to Have (Bonus, not required):

- Edge deployment systems. Shipping and updating software that runs on devices in the field, where a bad release is not something you roll back in five minutes.
- WebRTC and streaming. Realtime media or data streaming, including session setup, NAT traversal, and what actually degrades first under a poor network.
- Deep web frontend expertise beyond the working level above.

Keus Culture:

Join a team that is passionate about innovation and excellence. At Keus, we value creativity, collaboration, ownership and a commitment to leading the smart home revolution.

What Keus Offers:

- The opportunity to be at the forefront of the home automation industry, building connected products that live in high-end homes.
- A dynamic and supportive work environment that values innovation and creativity.
- Competitive salary and benefits.
- Qualified growth opportunities in a rapidly expanding company.

📌 Head - Software Delivery (Hyderabad)
🏢 Keus Smart Home
📍 Hyderabad