Head - Engineering & Platform - Hospitality

Head of Engineering & Platform | Build Technology Backbone for Premium Hospitality Brand

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Our client is a Series A premium food and hospitality company based in Mumbai, with a family of much-loved brands across dining, retail, and gifting. They are around 675 people today and heading towards 1,100 over the next two years, becoming more complex by the month : multiple brands, multiple formats, retail, gifting, dark stores, central kitchens, and eventually new cities.
They have always been hospitality-first operators. Everything they build is in service of the warmth and soul that made these brands what they are. They have intentionally kept technology light over the last ten years, which means there is no decade of legacy to untangle. The right person gets to build the right way, from a clean start.
This is a confidential search.
WHY THIS ROLE EXISTS :
The mandate over the next two years is not to build tech. It is to design the digital backbone of the company for the next five. A clean, unified, scalable foundation across operations, supply chain, data, and the systems that run the business, so that everything added later sits on something solid.
The belief is simple : technology, used well, becomes the multiplier. The question is how it can amplify hospitality : making experiences more intuitive, operations more dependable, and the brands more scalable without losing the soul that built them. That foundation is what this role owns.
This is the first of two technology leadership hires. This one builds the foundation. A guest and growth leader will follow, as a close partner, to build on top of it. The order is deliberate, because the foundation makes the rest possible.
WHAT YOU WILL OWN :
The foundation
- Design and build the core systems backbone : POS and ordering integrations, inventory, supply chain, ERP, and operational tooling across brands and formats
- Create one clean source of truth, so the whole organisation works off numbers it can trust, and a single, connected view of each guest across every brand
- Make the build-versus-buy calls and live with them, with a strong bias towards open systems, interoperability, and clean architecture
- Use AI thoughtfully, where it genuinely improves experience or efficiency, not for its own sake
Close to the ground
This is not a role that sits above the business. It sits inside it.
- Spend real time in kitchens, stores, and dispatch, understanding the workflows technology is meant to serve
- Build systems that fade into the background and simply make people better at what they do, rather than adding process and bureaucracy
- Partner with operations, finance, supply chain, and brand teams as the people who will actually use what you build
Thought partnership
- Think with the founders about the architecture of the company itself, not just its systems : what to build, what to buy, how to scale without slowing down
- Hire and lead a small, high-quality team as the function grows, while staying hands-on yourself
WHO YOU ARE :
- Roughly 10 to 16 years in engineering or platform roles, with real ownership of a platform build, ideally as a VP Engineering, Head of Engineering, Head of Platform, or technical co-founder
- You have built or scaled a platform that spans many products, brands, or business lines, not shipped a single product. You think in systems that others build on, not features
- You have built the operating backbone of a real, physical-operations business : food, retail, hospitality, cloud kitchens, or logistics. Not pure software, not app-only
- You are a builder who still enjoys technology hands-on. You have led teams, but you have not stopped reading architecture yourself
- You have made real build-versus-buy decisions and have a point of view on when to integrate best-of-breed tools versus build in-house
- You bring judgment, simplicity, and long-term thinking. You like operational businesses and the reality of being close to the ground
- You are excited by the guest and intelligence layer to come, and have enough product sensibility to build a foundation that unlocks it later, even though you are not the one who will own it
This is not a traditional CTO role building a large engineering organisation disconnected from the business. It is not a pure product management role. And it is not the guest, growth, and CRM layer, that is a separate leadership hire that will follow, as a partner to this role, building on the foundation you create.
WHAT THIS ROLE IS NOT :
This is not a traditional CTO role building a large engineering organisation disconnected from the business. It is not a pure product management role. And it is not the guest, growth, and CRM layer, that is a separate leadership hire that will follow, as a partner to this role, building on the foundation you create.
WHAT GOOD LOOKS LIKE IN TWO YEARS :
Technology feels calm, reliable, and trusted across the organisation. Teams spend less time firefighting and more time creating value. Decisions are sharper because the data is clearer and everyone is working off one version of the truth.
The systems support scale instead of slowing it down. And the company has a foundation strong enough to grow well beyond its home city, ready for a guest and growth leader to build on, without losing what makes it special in the first place.
WHY THIS, AND WHY NOW :
It is a fair question for a strong engineer : why join a food and hospitality company Here is the honest answer. As tech becomes more democratised, software alone stops being a moat. The brands that endure will be the ones with a real, touch-and-feel product and a genuine emotional connection with the people they serve. This is one of those brands. The chance is to build the technology spine of a company that already has the hardest thing to build, people who love it, and to do it from first principles, with no legacy to undo.
Real ownership, direct partnership with the founders, and a business with genuine consumer love behind it. If building the quiet, dependable spine that lets a hospitality company scale with its soul intact sounds like your kind of work, we would love to talk.