Delivery Head

HEAD – CUSTOMER ENGINEERING & DELIVERY

Location: Pune [on-site]

Experience: 14-20 years

Qalifications:

• Engineering degree or equivalent technical qualification.
• Postgraduate management qualification would be an advantage.

About i-TEK

i-TEK is one of India's leading AIDC and RFID technology organisations with a strong focus on next-generation products, platforms, intelligent edge ecosystems and embedded device engineering.

Over the past 26 years, i-TEK has built deep technology and domain expertise and a marquee enterprise customer base across retail, manufacturing, logistics and banking.

Today, i-TEK has:

• Over 5 billion items tagged
• More than 1,000 customers
• Over 250 million scans processed every day
• Deployments across 3,000+ retail outlets
• Coverage across more than 10 million sq. ft. of warehouse spaceAs i-TEK enters its next phase of growth, we are strengthening our product and platform-led strategy while expanding internationally.

i-TEK deployments typically combine sophisticated software platforms, RFID/AIDC technologies, edge devices and integration with customer enterprise environments. Successful delivery therefore requires much more than conventional project management. It requires a strong understanding of technology, domain processes, customer environments and execution at scale.

The incumbent will build and lead a multidisciplinary organisation comprising:

• Pre-Sales / Techno-Functional Consulting
• Business Analysis
• Project & Program Management
• Solution Architecture
• Customer/Project Software Engineering
• Quality Assurance
• Hardware / Device Engineering for customer deployments
• Hardware Production & Procurement Coordination
• Implementation & Deployment
• Customer Support
• Customer SuccessJob Description:

The role requires a leader who combines strong customer orientation, techno-functional depth, operational rigour and the ability to build and lead diverse, high-performing teams.

Key Responsibilities

1. End-to-End Customer Lifecycle Ownership

• Own the customer engineering and delivery journey from pre-sales engagement through implementation, go-live, support, adoption and ongoing customer success.
• Establish clear accountability across every stage of the customer lifecycle.
• Ensure seamless hand-offs between Sales, Product Management, Engineering, Delivery and Support.
• Build mechanisms to proactively identify and address customer risks before they become escalations.
• Ensure customer commitments are realistic, clearly documented and delivered with predictability.

2. Pre-Sales & Techno-Functional Solutioning

• Build and lead a strong pre-sales capability capable of combining technology understanding with deep domain knowledge.
• Work closely with Sales during customer discovery and opportunity development.
• Understand customer business processes, technology landscapes and operational requirements.
• Demonstrate the techno-functional capabilities of i-TEK products and platforms.
• Translate customer requirements into appropriate deployment and implementation approaches.
• Support solution workshops, demonstrations, RFP/RFI responses, technical proposals and customer presentations.
• Help Sales articulate differentiated value propositions based on i-TEK's technology and domain strengths.
• Ensure that commitments made during the sales cycle are technically feasible, scalable and commercially responsible.
• Ensure that pre-sales becomes a significant force multiplier for the business organisation.

3. Delivery & Program Management

• Own execution of customer programs across software, hardware and integrated deployments.
• Establish strong project and program governance.
• Ensure delivery against agreed scope, quality, cost and timelines.
• Establish clear milestone, dependency, risk and escalation management mechanisms.
• Create visibility through delivery dashboards and management reviews.
• Drive predictability and execution discipline across the delivery portfolio.
• Establish appropriate governance for large, complex and strategic customer programs.

4. Business Analysis & Requirements Management

• Build a strong Business Analysis capability capable of understanding both customer domains and i-TEK platform capabilities.
• Ensure requirements are clearly captured, analysed and translated into appropriate configurations, integrations or customer-specific implementation requirements.
• Prevent unnecessary customization by ensuring teams understand and leverage standard platform capabilities wherever possible.
• Establish traceability from requirements through implementation, testing and customer acceptance.
• Feed recurring requirements and market insights systematically back to Product Management and Engineering.

5. Solution Architecture & Deployment

• Oversee the Solution Architecture function responsible for defining deployment strategies for both SaaS and customer-hosted environments.
• Ensure customer deployments address scalability, high availability, security, performance, network topology, load balancing, firewalls, integration architecture, disaster recovery and business continuity.
• Ensure effective integration of Garuda Vigil and Skanixa into customer technology ecosystems.
• Maintain deployment standards and reusable reference architectures.
• Ensure Solution Architects act as trusted technical advisors to customer technology teams.

6. Software Implementation & Quality Assurance

• Lead customer/project software engineering required for integrations, configurations and approved customer-specific requirements.
• Establish clear boundaries between reusable product/platform engineering and customer-specific implementation engineering.
• Ensure strong engineering practices are followed even for customer-specific development.
• Build rigorous QA and testing disciplines across deployments.
• Drive automation across regression testing, integration testing and deployment validation.
• Ensure production releases meet agreed quality, security and performance standards.

7. Hardware, Devices & Fulfilment

• Plan hardware requirements aligned with project schedules.
• Coordinate production and procurement of devices and associated components.
• Ensure appropriate inventory and supply planning.
• Drive quality assurance for customer-bound hardware.
• Coordinate configuration, testing and readiness of devices prior to deployment.
• Ensure hardware and software components come together as an integrated customer deployment.
• Manage dependencies and risks across suppliers, production, logistics and implementation teams.

8. Implementation, Go-Live & Operational Readiness

• Establish robust deployment and go-live methodologies.
• Ensure appropriate readiness reviews prior to production rollout.
• Drive structured migration, cutover and stabilization processes.
• Ensure monitoring, support processes and escalation mechanisms are operational before go-live.
• Minimise disruption to customer operations during implementation.
• Establish clear acceptance and transition-to-support criteria.

9. Customer Support

• Build a mature support organisation combining proactive/preventive and reactive support.
• Establish clearly defined support processes and service levels.
• Monitor platform and device environments proactively wherever applicable.
• Identify recurring issues and drive permanent corrective actions.
• Establish effective incident, problem and escalation management.
• Build appropriate L1/L2/L3 support models and clear escalation paths into Engineering.
• Drive root-cause analysis rather than repeated symptomatic fixes.
• Use automation and AI to improve support responsiveness and resolution quality.

10. Customer Success

• Establish a structured Customer Success function for strategic customers.
• Track adoption and utilisation of deployed capabilities.
• Conduct periodic customer reviews.
• Identify opportunities to improve value realization from i-TEK products and platforms.
• Proactively identify customer dissatisfaction or adoption risks.
• Build strong executive relationships with key customers.
• Create mechanisms for capturing customer feedback and feeding it into Product Management, Engineering and Business teams.
• Drive referenceability, advocacy and long-term customer relationships.

11. AI, Automation & Productivity

• Aggressively leverage AI and automation across the organisation, including AI-assisted requirements analysis and documentation, software development and code review, automated test generation and QA, project risk identification, knowledge management, support diagnostics, incident analysis, customer query resolution, documentation and training, and delivery analytics and forecasting.
• Drive measurable improvements in productivity, quality, speed and customer experience rather than adoption of AI tools for its own sake.

12. Delivery Processes & Operational Excellence

• Define standardized methodologies across pre-sales, implementation, deployment, support and customer success.
• Build reusable playbooks, templates and deployment frameworks.
• Establish meaningful operational metrics and dashboards.
• Drive continuous improvement using data and root-cause analysis.
• Reduce dependence on individual knowledge by institutionalising processes and documentation.
• Ensure lessons from customer deployments are systematically captured and reused.

13. Cross-Functional Leadership

• Work closely with the Chief Business Officer / Sales on opportunity qualification, pre-sales, customer commitments and strategic pursuits.
• Work closely with the Head of Engineering on product readiness, engineering escalations, quality and platform improvements.
• Work closely with the Chief Architect on architecture standards and complex deployment patterns.
• Work closely with Product Management on requirements, customer feedback and product roadmap inputs.
• Work closely with Supply Chain, Finance and Commercial functions on procurement, hardware planning, commercial commitments and program economics.
• Create strong alignment between what is sold, built, deployed and supported.

Customer obsession will be a defining characteristic of this role. The incumbent should establish a culture where teams:

• Understand the customer's business rather than merely the technical specification.
• Take ownership of customer outcomes.
• Communicate transparently.
• Anticipate problems rather than wait for escalation.
• Treat quality and reliability as non-negotiable.
• Balance responsiveness to customers with the integrity and scalability of i-TEK's products and platforms.Team Leadership
• Build strong functional leaders beneath the role.
• Define clear accountability across teams.
• Develop technical and domain capabilities.
• Establish a high-performance culture.
• Mentor future leaders.
• Build succession plans for critical roles.
• Ensure teams are equipped to support i-TEK's international expansion and increasingly complex global customers.

Experience

• Approximately 15-20+ years of relevant experience, with significant leadership responsibility.
• Demonstrated experience leading large and diverse customer-facing technology organisations.
• Proven track record delivering complex software and hardware / device-led programs for enterprise customers.
• Experience managing multiple simultaneous customer programs at scale.
• Strong exposure to enterprise software/platform implementations and integrations.
• Experience across the full lifecycle from pre-sales through delivery and support/customer success.
• Experience in Retail Technology, Manufacturing Technology, Supply Chain & Logistics, Enterprise Automation, Industrial IoT, and/or AIDC / RFID would be particularly valuable.
• Direct RFID experience is desirable but not mandatory; strong enterprise technology delivery experience and the ability to understand the domain are more important.

Leadership & Personal Attributes

• Exceptional customer orientation.
• Strong techno-functional capability.
• Excellent communication and presentation skills.
• Ability to engage credibly with CIOs, CTOs and senior business stakeholders.
• Strong program and operational management capability.
• Ability to lead diverse technical and customer-facing teams.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills.
• High ownership and accountability.
• Ability to operate effectively in complex and ambiguous situations.
• Passion for quality and execution excellence.
• Ability to combine strategic thinking with hands-on intervention when required.

Success Metrics

• On-time and on-quality delivery
• Customer satisfaction
• Customer adoption and success
• Deployment quality
• Program predictability
• Reduction in implementation escalations
• Support SLA performance
• Reduction in recurring incidents
• Hardware fulfilment predictability
• Quality and first-time-right performance
• Improved pre-sales effectiveness
• Customer referenceability
• Productivity improvements through AI and automation
• Improved reuse and standardization across implementations

At i-TEK, the objective is not merely to successfully complete projects. It is to ensure that customers derive sustained value from products and platforms that become integral to their operations.