Director Applications Development

Integrated Business Applications - Team Leader - India (15+ years)

Team Description

Anaplan applications are the strategic pillar of the Anaplan strategy, bringing best-in-class planning capabilities to our customers built on the Anaplan platform. As the Offshore Application Team Leader, you will establish and lead a new 25-person hub in India, providing a key capability for scaling our applications offering and serving as the vital bridge to our UK and US Centers of Excellence. This pivotal role delivers additional global capacity, flexible resource and is integral in taking our applications product organization to the next level.

Your Impact

Team Leadership & Development

• Lead, inspire, and manage a newly established, high-performing offshore team of approximately 25 professionals, including Anaplan Model Builders, Solution Architects, QA engineers, and Product Owners.
• Act as the primary onsite representative and leader in India, fostering a strong team culture aligned with global organizational values.
• Drive line management, conduct performance evaluations, and actively mentor individuals to support their career progression.
• Cultivate a strong "engineering mindset" within the team, ensuring that even without traditional software coding, the team applies rigorous, structural, and scalable thinking to model building.

Delivery Excellence

• Oversee the end-to-end delivery and health of Anaplan application builds, ensuring projects meet strict quality, timeline, and budget expectations.
• Establish and enforce robust QA and testing processes tailored to the Anaplan platform to minimize defects and technical debt.
• Manage resource allocation, capacity planning, and prioritize workloads across multiple project streams to optimize the team's output.
• Identify, escalate, and proactively mitigate delivery risks before they impact the business.

Technical Strategy & Collaboration

• Serve as the critical, strategic interface between the offshore delivery center in India and the onshore Application Centers of Excellence (CoEs) based in the UK and US.
• Translate onshore architectural visions and technical strategies into actionable delivery plans for the offshore team.
• Facilitate seamless, daily collaboration across time zones, actively removing blockers and ensuring the offshore team has the context needed to succeed.
• Align the offshore team's output with global Anaplan architecture guidelines and governance standards.

Platform & Product Mindset

• Champion a product-centric approach to Anaplan application development, shifting the focus from mere task execution to delivering true business value.
• Guide the team in understanding the broader business context and user needs behind the models they are building.
• Ensure the adoption of Anaplan best practices throughout the development lifecycle.
• Ensuring that the team focus on building broad configurable applications considering how different customers may have different needs for otherwise similar functionality

Your Qualifications

Leadership & Management

• Proven track record of building, managing, and scaling technology or platform delivery teams (ideally 20+ members) in an offshore/nearshore model.
• Extensive experience in line management, performance evaluation, and team motivation.

Technical Depth

• Sufficient exposure to the Anaplan platform to thoroughly understand the context, challenges, terminology, and best practices of model building and architecture.
• While hands-on Anaplan model building is not a requirement for this role, you must possess a strong technical intuition and the ability to fluently discuss architectural concepts with your Solution Architects.
• Strong understanding of enterprise performance management (EPM) concepts or connected planning ecosystems.

Delivery & Process

• Deep expertise in Agile delivery methodologies, sprint planning, and product management principles.
• Experience establishing and refining software development lifecycles (SDLC) that are specifically tailored for platform-based configuration and building, rather than traditional custom code.
• Demonstrated ability to implement rigorous quality assurance, peer-review, and testing standards.

Communication & Collaboration

• Exceptional stakeholder management skills, with a proven ability to build trust and bridge geographical and cultural gaps with UK and US-based leadership teams.
• Strong executive presence and the ability to articulate complex delivery metrics, project statuses, and technical challenges to senior onshore stakeholders.
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills, with the ability to context-switch between highly technical architectural discussions and high-level strategic updates.

Preferred Skills

• Track record of building trust rapidly in new environments
• Experience in enterprise performance management
• Experience scaling systems and teams under high throughput demands
• Ability to navigate ambiguity and drive delivery without perfect information
• Comfort with asynchronous collaboration and remote team dynamics
• Previous experience running an Anaplan professional services, consulting, or center of excellence team