Associate Director Data Engineering

Freecharge is a well-known name in the world of payment apps, serving over 100 million users across the country. A 100% subsidiary of Axis Bank, Freecharge has always been known for offering safe and seamless UPI payments, utility bill payments, mobile/DTH recharges, and much more. Moreover, users can easily make payments at offline or online merchants via a robust infrastructure that supports UPI, Debit/ Credit Cards, Wallet, and other options. Freecharge even offers multiple Axis Bank Credit Cards and is constantly building new products to support small and midsize retailers across payments and lending. For more details, please visit https://www.freecharge.in or download the Freecharge app.

Do You Make The Cut?

Associate Director – Data Engineering

Title: Associate Director (Data Engineering)

Location: Gurugram (Hybrid)

Experience: 10-12 Yrs.

Education: Bachelor’s / Master’s in Software Engineering

Responsibilities

• Leadership & Mentorship: Lead and mentor a team of data engineers, fostering technical excellence, innovation, and collaboration.
• Architecture & Roadmap: Own the technical vision and roadmap for the data engineering function, ensuring alignment with business and AI-driven priorities.
• Platform Engineering: Design, develop, and maintain real-time and batch data platforms with a focus on scalability, performance, and cost-efficiency.
• ETL/ELT & Data Warehousing: Architect ETL/ELT processes, streaming pipelines, and modern data lake/warehouse solutions (e.g., Redshift, Snowflake).
• Streaming & Big Data: Build and optimize Spark and Structured Spark Streaming pipelines to support large-scale, low-latency data use cases.
• AI/ML & GenAI Enablement: Partner with Data Science and AI teams to enable advanced AI/ML, GenAI, and MLOps use cases; experience with agentic systems and LLM workflows is a plus.
• Modern Data Stack: Drive adoption of modern orchestration and streaming tools (e.g., Airflow, Kafka) and implement best practices in engineering and operations.
• Governance & Trust: Champion data observability, lineage, quality, and privacy initiatives to ensure trusted data across the organization.
• Reliability & Security: Ensure platforms meet enterprise standards of reliability, scalability, security, and compliance across real-time and batch workloads.

Required Skills and Experience:

• 10+ years of experience in

  data engineering

  with proven leadership in scaling enterprise-grade platforms.
• Strong hands-on expertise with

  Spark, Structured Spark Streaming

  , and modern data architectures.
• Experience architecting

  real-time streaming pipelines

  and

  cloud-based data warehouses/lakes

  .
• Deep understanding of

  data modeling, governance, security, and observability practices

  .
• Exposure to

  AI/ML, Generative AI, and MLOps

  ; familiarity with

  vector databases, RAG frameworks, and intelligent agents

  is an advantage.
• Solid grasp of data architecture, system design, and performance optimization at scale.
• Strong knowledge of

  modern data stack tools

  (Airflow, Kafka, etc.).
• Demonstrated ability to lead cross-functional teams, define technical strategy, and deliver business impact.
• Experience working in an agile development environment and managing sprint-based delivery cycles.