Head of Platform Engineering - Underwriting

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Head of Platform Engineering / Principal Architect

Company Overview:
Fractal Analytics is a strategic AI partner to Fortune 500 companies with a vision to power every human decision in the enterprise. Fractal is building a world where individual choices, freedom, and diversity are the greatest assets. An ecosystem where human imagination is at the heart of every decision.

Fractal is focusing on selling world-class suite of vertical and functional AI products that solve high value enterprise problems​ under the brand Cogentiq.

About Cogentiq (Fractal’s Agentic AI Platform): Cogentiq is Fractal’s secure, scalable, enterprise agentic AI platform that enables teams to build, test, deploy, monitor agents and multi‑agent workflows with strong observability, evaluation, guardrails and RBAC across any cloud or LLM framework. It includes a no/low‑code development console, Agent & MCP Gateways, and an enterprise marketplace for reusable agents, tools, connections and guardrails.

Role Description

You will own the end‑to‑end architecture, reliability, and integration strategy for Cogentiq‑UW—a cloud-native, multi-tenant underwriting platform that provides centralized visibility, governance, and configuration across modules and agents. You’ll architect high-performance backend systems, design a robust integration layer with insurers’ core systems and third‑party data providers, and partner with Data Science to productionize agents safely and explainably.

This is a hands-on leadership role: you’ll define the platform blueprint (APIs, workflows, state machines), set reliability and security bars (SLOs, DR, SOC2 readiness, GDPR), build out observability & FinOps, champion demo/sandbox environments, and represent engineering in pre-sales and conferences. You’ll also hire and grow a high‑caliber team that balances quality with execution speed.

You will:

• Architect the platform’s multi-tenant, API-first, event-driven design, including HIL (Human-in-the-Loop) workbenches, exception handling, state-machines, and audit trails.
• Lead cloud deployment (multi-region, auto-scaling, active‑active/DR), achieve 99.9%+ SLOs, and design for low‑latency real-time APIs with graceful degradation.
• Own the integration layer—out-of-the-box connectors for Guidewire/Duck Creek, SSO (OAuth2/OIDC/SAML), third-party data (credit bureaus, CAT/exposure models, loss databases), and internal tools.
• Establish security & compliance (E2E encryption, least privilege, key rotation, vuln scanning, SOC 2 readiness, GDPR-aligned data privacy with zero PII retention in analytics stores).
• Partner with Data Science to deploy agentic/LLM features with guardrails, evaluation harnesses, explainability, and versioned rollout.
• Build observability (tracing/metrics/logs), alerting based on SLOs, FinOps dashboards (cost monitoring/optimization), usage & billing/chargeback metering, and ROI reporting.
• Stand up demo & sandbox environments (pre-loaded data, module/agent config testing) to accelerate sales and implementation.
• Lead pre‑sales conversations with IT/Tech leaders, handle RFPs, deliver conference talks, and act as a credible technical face of the platform.
• Hire, mentor, and evolve the team; define paved roads (CI/CD/IaC), coding standards, and operational excellence (runbooks, incident reviews, upgrade pathways).

Technical Mastery

Platform & Systems Architecture (SaaS/B2B)

• Multi-tenant, API-first, event-driven design with state machines for underwriting workflows; strong versioning, backward compatibility, and feature-flagged rollouts.
• Robust HIL and exception handling with auditability and idempotent reprocessing.

Cloud Reliability & Performance (SRE Discipline)

• Kubernetes + IaC (Terraform/Helm), multi-region topologies, RTO/RPO defined and tested, autoscaling, caching, backpressure, circuit breakers, and p95 latency ownership.

Enterprise Integrations (Insurance Core + Data Providers)

• REST/OAS3, webhooks, OAuth2/OIDC/SAML, API gateways; resilient connectors to Guidewire/Duck Creek, credit/score providers, CAT/exposure models, loss databases; retries/DLQs/idempotency and dynamic endpoint switching.

Security, Compliance & Data Governance (BFSI-grade)

• E2E encryption, KMS/Vault, least privilege, key rotation, vuln scanning/pen tests; SOC 2 Type II readiness, GDPR controls, and a no‑PII analytics architecture with anonymization pipelines and strict access controls.

Agents/AI Productionization & Data Collaboration

• Deploying agentic/LLM components with guardrails, sandboxed tool-use, timeouts, evaluation frameworks, drift monitoring, and explainability surfaced in the HIL interface; tight collaboration with Data Science across batch/stream features, model registries, and safe rollouts.

Qualifications

Must‑Haves

• 12–15+ years in backend/platform engineering with 5+ years leading platform or core backend teams for B2B/SaaS products.
• Proven ownership of cloud-native, multi-tenant platforms with 99.9%+ SLOs, multi-region deployments, DR drills, and incident management (runbooks, postmortems).
• Deep expertise in Kubernetes, IaC (Terraform/Helm), API gateways, queues/streams; strong command of low-latency API design, caching, and throughput optimization.
• Hands-on enterprise integrations experience with insurer core systems (preferably Guidewire/Duck Creek), SSO (OAuth2/OIDC/SAML), and third‑party data sources.
• Strong security & compliance grounding: encryption at rest/in transit, secrets mgmt, key rotation, SOC 2 readiness, GDPR-aligned data privacy, audit trails.
• Demonstrated delivery of agentic/LLM or ML-powered features in production with measurable reliability and quality (evals, guardrails, rollbacks).
• Effective customer-facing communicator—confident with CIO/CTO/CISO stakeholders, experienced in pre‑sales, RFPs, and conference presentations.
• Track record building high-performing teams and cultures balancing quality with speed (paved roads, CI/CD, trunk-based dev, strong code review standards).

Nice‑to‑Haves

• Direct accelerators or integration frameworks for Guidewire/Duck Creek; BPM/workflow engines (Temporal/Cadence, Camunda).
• FinOps practice leadership: cost allocation, showback/chargeback, optimization playbooks.
• Experience designing usage/billing metering, ROI dashboards, and admin/observability portals.
• Prior conference talks, publications, or community contributions

Location Preference: Bengaluru

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