Director, Software Engineer - WhatsApp

Company and Role Overview

WhatsApp is a global messaging platform used by over 3 billion people worldwide in more than 180 countries. In India, WhatsApp serves as a hub for communication, business engagement, and increasingly, for digital payments. To advance these services, WhatsApp has formed a new Services team aimed at expanding the platform's usefulness and developing innovative features.

This role is a leadership position for the India engineering operations of the WhatsApp Services team. The team functions like a startup within WhatsApp, focusing on rapid innovation and agility. It builds upon the existing payments engineering foundation, which is a live and expanding service in India.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead and oversee multiple engineering teams and managers driving some of WhatsApp and Meta's highest priority projects.
• Develop and implement engineering strategies and coordinated roadmaps that align technical focus, emerging technologies, and business drivers.
• Create and communicate a unified technical vision across Meta's family of apps including WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, and Messenger, ensuring clarity on objectives, timelines, and team roles.
• Expand and nurture the engineering division by recruiting, mentoring, and retaining engineering talent and leadership across various teams.
• Design team structures and operational frameworks to optimize impact while simplifying organizational complexity and minimizing execution overhead.
• Collaborate closely with product, design, and data science teams to maintain shared responsibility for delivering product outcomes across development cycles.
• Identify and mitigate complex cross-team execution barriers, such as scope misalignment, dependency issues, and resource conflicts, escalating appropriately when needed.
• Promote a culture emphasizing excellent execution, analytical rigor, continuous process enhancements, and operational efficiency.
• Uphold and encourage high-quality engineering practices and standards to foster an environment of ongoing improvement.
• Monitor organizational health, maintaining high team engagement, low attrition, and positive team dynamics across reporting lines.
• Support leadership development through hiring and internal growth initiatives, contributing to Meta-wide engineering efforts like recruitment, mentoring, and technical standards enforcement.

Basic Qualifications

• Minimum of 10 years’ experience in software engineering within the tech industry.
• At least 7 years in engineering management, including managing engineering managers.
• Proven ability to build, grow, and sustain engineering organizations, involving recruitment and talent development.
• Demonstrated success delivering and operating large-scale production systems.
• Experience crafting technical strategies and multi-team roadmaps, successfully driving execution.
• Track record of establishing effective cross-functional partnerships with product, design, and data science teams to achieve engineering goals.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or an equivalent technical discipline or relevant experience.

Preferred Qualifications

• Expertise in building and managing payment systems at scale, including understanding reliability, compliance, and regulatory aspects.
• Background in domains such as monetization, commerce, payments, or artificial intelligence/machine learning products.
• Experience launching and growing teams or new product areas from the ground up.
• Familiar with managing products designed for global markets, especially within emerging economies.
• Proven ability to lead distributed teams across several locations.
• Experience with consumer-facing, mobile-first messaging platforms.

About Meta

Meta is a technology company focused on connecting people, building communities, and fostering commerce. Beyond pioneering social media since 2004, Meta is advancing into immersive experiences such as augmented and virtual reality. Working at Meta means contributing to the next wave of social technology breakthroughs that surpass current digital interaction limits.

Compensation and Benefits

Compensation for this position is determined based on skills, qualifications, experience, and location. The stated figures represent base compensation and exclude bonuses, stock options, or commissions. Meta also provides extensive benefits to its employees.