Job Description
Position - Chief Technology Officer (CTO)
UIDAI Technology Centre, Bengaluru
Location: Bengaluru (On-site)
Experience: 20+ years
₹ Compensation: ₹1 Crore per annum (negotiable, based on profile)
Reporting to: DDG, Technology Centre
ABOUT THE ROLE
UIDAI is looking for a visionary Chief Technology Officer to own one of the world's largest digital identity platforms. As CTO, you will own the technology stack, the platform engineering vision and the long-term architecture roadmap. You will lead modernisation, set enterprise standards, build an AI-first way of working, put zero-trust security in place, and keep every platform service running at five-nines availability.
Strategic Engineering Mandate & Goals
Technology Stack Governance & Modernisation
• Own the full lifecycle of the stack: software, enterprise hardware, cloud-native infrastructure and domain-specific hardware
• Set enterprise architecture standards, assess technical debt and lead modernisation of mission-critical platforms
• Standardise frameworks, runtimes, databases and middleware so systems work together, avoid vendor lock-in and stay agile
Strategic Roadmap & R&D
• Build and govern multi-year technology roadmaps aligned with organisational goals
• Lead R&D in partnership with premier academic, research and industry institutions
• Sponsor and direct proofs-of-concept (POCs) on next-generation architectures, to lower the risk of production rollouts
Platform Engineering & Developer Velocity
• Build a self-service Internal Developer Platform (IDP) that gives teams deployment speed on par with the hyperscalers
• Automate provisioning, orchestration and CI/CD pipelines
• Improve developer experience and productivity, and replace manual, ticket-driven workflows
Enterprise AI & Intelligent Automation
• Lead an AI-first strategy across fraud management, observability, infrastructure and developer tooling
• Put intelligent automation to work for anomaly detection, capacity forecasting, incident triage and reducing routine operational work
• Make AI-first thinking the default design principle for new capabilities
Observability & Operational Resilience (99.999%)
• Design full-stack telemetry (metrics, logs, traces, synthetic testing) to cut detection and resolution times (MTTD/MTTR)
• Build SRE practices, error-budget governance and resilience testing into how teams work
• Be the senior escalation point during critical outages and capacity issues
Security, Compliance & Data Governance
• Build zero-trust security and data protection into the whole SDLC
• Enforce data residency, audit and regulatory compliance without slowing engineering down
• Hold final technical sign-off on platform architecture, data platforms and security baselines
Operational Governance
• Advise on build vs. outsource vs. hybrid delivery models, including vendor evaluation and contract deliverables
• Lead talent strategy: team structure, hiring and performance management across systems, software, security and domain architects
• Act as the executive escalation point for cross-functional blockers
WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR
Education
• Essential: BE / MS / M.Tech / ME in Computer Science, IT, Electronics or an allied discipline from a premier institution
• Desirable: PhD in a relevant engineering discipline
Experience & Competencies
• 20+ years of progressive experience in IT and software engineering, including executive technology leadership roles
• A track record of setting multi-year roadmaps and delivering large-scale platform modernisation
• Deep expertise in high-concurrency developer platforms, cloud-native control planes, modern data backbones and SRE programs at consumer scale or in mission-critical settings
• Hands-on experience building an AI-first engineering culture and embedding ML into core platform operations
• Strong knowledge of global best practices in software, hardware and cybersecurity
• Added advantage: experience with high-security hardware, identity architectures or biometric technologies
WHY JOIN?
Shape the technology behind a digital identity platform that serves over a billion people, and lead innovation at national scale.
HOW TO APPLY
Apply through LinkedIn or send your CV to cfo@gadigital.in with the subject line "Application – CTO, UIDAI Bengaluru".