Director of Engineering Excellence

TechGrove is the Centre of Excellence for Banyan Software, based in Chennai, India. It plays a key role in supporting Banyan’s global businesses through technology, security, and software development. TechGrove brings together India’s deep pool of technical talent with Banyan’s long-term approach to growth, creating a trusted, developer-focused environment where people can do their best work.

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.