Director of Engineering Excellence

About Banyan

Banyan Software is the best permanent home for software businesses that serve specialized industries, their employees, and their customers. With a buy-grow-and-hold-for-life approach and a permanent capital base, Banyan acquires and grows companies worldwide, honoring founder legacies and helping portfolio companies modernize through shared AI expertise and operational discipline. Founded in 2016, Banyan operates more than 130 portfolio companies across North and South America, Europe, and APAC, and has appeared on the Inc. 5000 list for six consecutive years. The Banyan Software Foundation, endowed with $100 million in Banyan stock, leverages technology to build a greener and more equitable world.

The Role

We are building TechGrove, our engineering center of excellence in Bangalore, into the place our operating companies turn to for senior, AI-native engineering teams. We call these teams AI Engineering Pods. An AI Pod is three to five engineers who work inside one of our operating companies that deliver world-class features (many backed by AI capabilities) into our operating company’s modernized SaaS applications. They use agentic tools like Claude Code and our banyan-memory-bank agentic coding harness to operate like YC-backed AI-native startups.

The AI Pod model only works if the engineering inside every pod is consistently excellent, and that consistency doesn't happen on its own. This role exists to make it happen. You will set the engineering standard the pods build to, grow the engineers who staff them, enable the sharing and development of the right tools and practices, and steer the engineering culture across the center of excellence.

You will do this without managing the pods nor software delivery directly. The AI Pods do not report to you, so your influence comes from standards that engineers trust, tooling they actually want to use, and coaching that makes them better. If you have done this before, you know it is harder than leading through a reporting line, and you also know it lasts longer.

You will start with a keen focus on TechGrove. As the process is refined and proven there, we expect you to take them to engineering teams at Banyan HQ and across our distributed operating companies.

What You Will Do

• Build the engineering culture at TechGrove. Set the expectations for how our engineers work: rigorous code review, clean and well-tested code, security designed in from the start, and real ownership of what ships. This is the most important part of the job.
• Grow our engineers. Run onboarding, pairing, and hands-on coaching so we can develop senior, AI-fluent engineers in-house faster than we could hire them.
• Define the engineering standard. Master the AI-native development lifecycle the pods follow, including the quality gates every change has to pass and the practices for reviewing work produced by AI agents, so you can evangelize and enforce the standard. Once there, you can raise the bar as the tools and help the team improve beyond the standard.
• Drive adoption of our developer tooling. Get tools like Banyan Memory Bank, our Claude Code plugin for planning, building, and testing with agents, into engineers' daily work. Feed what you learn back to the people who build them.  Cross-pollinate what is working by creating mechanisms of sharing between the teams and the organization.
• Drive continuing education in India. Deliver our Agentic Coding Workshop curriculum to TechGrove engineers and help improve it based on what you see in the room. The broader program is run from HQ but you will shape and deliver continuing education throughout TechGrove.
• Lead our Engineering Excellence program. This includes our use of Span, the engineering analytics platform we use to measure delivery and AI-assisted productivity. Define a small set of signals and a review cadence that show whether each pod is meeting the standard, and use them to decide where to coach.
• Share what works. Take the practices that prove themselves at TechGrove to engineering teams at HQ and across our operating companies, help develop the Engineering Excellence playbook working alongside our Technical Operating Partners.

How the Role Is Set Up

• Reports to: TechGrove’s General Manager, with a dotted line to Banyan’s Head of AI.
• Direct reports: None in the pods. 
• Location: Bangalore, on-site with the engineers you are developing, with travel to Chennai office periodically

What You Bring

• 10+ years in software engineering, including significant time as a Principal or Staff Engineer, Architect, or senior engineering leader on complex production systems. You can still do the work, and engineers can tell.
• A track record of improving the performance of teams you did not manage, through standards, coaching, and example.
• Real enjoyment in developing engineers, whether through mentoring, onboarding programs, or building a learning culture.
• Daily, hands-on use of AI and a fundamental understanding of agentic coding tools such as Claude Code, and a clear point of view on how AI-native teams should build, review, and test software.
• Depth in engineering fundamentals: clean code, Domain-Driven Design, Twelve-Factor principles, meaningful test coverage, DevSecOps, and application security.
• Working fluency across modern stacks (.NET Core, Python, TypeScript, Java, React and Next.js) and cloud-native delivery on AWS and Azure, enough to be credible and useful to any pod.
• The ability to explain hard ideas simply and hold a room of engineers.

Nice to Have

• Experience building or driving adoption of internal developer tools or platforms.
• Experience starting and running an engineering guild or community of practice.
• Experience modernizing large enterprise or B2B applications and/or development of multi-tenant SaaS applications.
• Familiarity with GenAI architecture, including RAG, LLM orchestration, multi-agent systems, MCP, and context engineering.
• Experience leading distributed or offshore engineering teams.

What Success Looks Like

• After 90 days: You know the pods and their engineers well. The engineering standard is written down and agreed with the pod leads, and your first KPIs across teams are underway.
• After 6 months: Pods are measured against the standard, adoption of our agentic tooling is broad, and you can point to specific engineers who have grown under your coaching.
• After 12 months: TechGrove is developing senior engineers faster than we could hire them, and at least one practice proven there has been adopted by an engineering team at one of our operating companies.

Why Join Us

• Your work compounds. A standard you set or an engineer you develop shows up in every pod, and in every operating company those pods serve.
• AI-native is how we work. Our engineers build with agentic tools by default, and you will help decide how that is done well.
• We think long term. We buy software businesses and keep them, so the engineering culture you build is meant to last.
• You will shape something new. The pod model is early, and the person in this seat will have a real hand in what it becomes.

Should You Apply?

We wrote this description to be honest about the job, so you probably won't match every line. If you are a senior engineer or engineering leader who gets more satisfaction from making the people around you better than from being the strongest engineer in the room, and you have real conviction about how software should be built with AI, we would like to hear from you.

How to Apply

Along with your resume, send a short note about a time you raised the engineering standard of a team you did not manage. Tell us what you changed, how you got people to adopt it, and how you knew it worked.