Chief technology officer

Unique Identification Authority Of India · Bengaluru, India

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: Ph D 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 Linked In or send your CV to with the subject line "Application – CTO, UIDAI Bengaluru".