Position:  Director-Product Development Engineering

Job Location: Pune India

Department: MetLife India – Asia Delivery

Role Value Proposition 

MetLife is offering an exciting opportunity to contribute to our digital and AI transformation journey. We are seeking an experienced technology leader to drive the transformation that will enable business results. 

The Product Development Engineering Lead has end to end responsibility, partnering with the business, on the technology strategy and roadmap including the implementation of modern technology,adoption of AI, GenAI, and automation capabilities to transform client and customer experiences.   

Key Responsibilities:

• People Management - Managing full stack software engineers located in multiple countries, upskilling/reskilling, hiring / retention agenda.
• Stakeholder Management - Managing key business stakeholders to deliver required technology capabilities to support the digital transformation agenda. Driving prioritization of the product backlog. This includes managing key vendors providing the resources, SaaS & other capabilities.
• Technology Implementation – Collaborating with all parties including the business to deliver business results, as well as technology projects. 
• Ways of Working – Adoption of the Agile ways of working in the software delivery lifecycle.
• E2E Software Lifecycle Management (Architecture, Design, Development, Testing & Production) 

• Driving the decisions and implementation of technology best practices, architecture and technology stack including adoption of cloud, AI/Data, and other relevant emerging technology that is fit-for-purpose. 
• Integrate AI/GenAI/ML into products and engineering workflows
• Driving architecture selection, software design, execution, and operations at the solution level, enabling the business to operationalize the day-to-day functions of the application/platform. 
• Lead technical design and development of applications using existing and emerging technology platforms. Partner with Product Family Executive on technology strategy aligned to business. 
• Develop applications for business solutions. 
• Conduct peer reviews of solution designs and related code, ensuring adherence to best practice guidelines and compliance with security and privacy mandates. 
• Investigate and resolve escalated production management incidents, problems, and service requests. 
• Ensure disaster recovery, privacy, and security are aligned to enable application/platform stability, including technology currency management. 

• Partner with Cyber & IT Security, Data Analytics, Infrastructure, Global Risk Management, Compliance, and Internal Audit to provide the holistic provision of technology services including risks, controls and security, to the business.

Candidate Qualifications:   

Education: 

• Bachelor of Computer Science or equivalent  

Experience: 

15+ years in leading software engineering teams to drive digital transformation in financial services or technology domain.

Developing and implementing applications using modern technology stack and patterns including cloud native patterns, public cloud (e.g. Microsoft Azure), API and web/mobile apps (Java/React).

Prior experience in developing mission critical applications, highly resilient, secure and performant from scratch in a complex and regulated environments will be an added advantage.

Proficiency in software development lifecycle including CI/CD, test driven development, domain driven design and Agile ways of working.

Strong experience in driving digital transformation especially people and cultural transformation 

Proven track record in partnering with the business to deliver mission critical transformation via Agile approach.

Experience integrating AI‑powered development tools such as GitHub Copilot into software delivery workflows. Designing or implementing GenAI‑supported applications using cloud services (Azure preferred).

Knowledge of AI governance, responsible/ethical AI practices, and regulatory considerations in financial services.Understanding of MLOps processes, model deployment, versioning, and monitoring.

Language:

• Proficiency at business level in English. Japanese is an added advantage.

Skills and Competencies:

• Competencies 

• Communication: Ability to influence and help communicate the organization’s direction and ensure results are achieved
• Collaboration: Proven track record of building collaborative partnerships and ability to operate effectively in a global environment
• People Management: Inspiring, motivating and leading diverse and distributed teams
• Diverse environment: Can-do attitude and ability to work in a high paced environment

• Tech Stack

Development & Delivery Methods: 

Agile (Scaled Agile Framework)

DevOps and CI/CD:

Containers (Azure Kubernetes)

CI/CD (Azure DevOps, Git, SonarQube)

Scheduling Tools (Azure Scheduler)

Development Frameworks and Languages:

Microservices (Java, Springboot)

UI & Web (ReactJS, HTML, Javascript)

Mobile (Swift, Objective-C, React Native, Ionic Framework)

Data Management:

Database (SQL Server, Cosmos DB)

APIs (Kong, APIC, APIM)

Development Tools & Platforms:7

IDE (GitHub Copilot, VSCODE, IntelliJ)

Cloud Platform (Microsoft Azure)

Security and Monitoring:

Secure Coding (Veracode)

Authentication/Authorization (CA SiteMinder, MS Entra, PingOne)

Log & Monitoring (Azure AppInsights, Elastic)