For five years, Mohit Kumar was the digital lead for Stolt Tankers, working out of Singapore, Houston, US and the Netherlands. Today, he’s based in Hyderabad, India, building Stolt-Nielsen’s new Digital Innovation Centre from scratch. We spoke to Mohit about the journey so far, the thinking behind DICe, and what it takes to build a high-performing team from the ground up.

Returning to India to solve a real problem

Through his years in digital leadership, Mohit saw the same challenge play out again and again. Digital teams were nimble in the early days, he says, but as the roadmap grew, so did Stolt-Nielsen’s web of vendors. Delivering on commitments became harder to control.

That challenge became the seed of DICe: a way for Stolt-Nielsen to bring delivery, and the people behind it, back in-house. For Mohit, it was personal too. After almost a decade living abroad, he had always planned to return to India. “When the idea of DICe became concrete, I thought it was a great opportunity for me to fix the challenges in our delivery processes and return to India,” he says.

Three things sealed the decision. First, the chance to build a genuine, value-based delivery hub that solves problems he’d faced firsthand. Second, a broader view across Stolt-Nielsen’s businesses and their digital ambitions. Third, the opportunity to help shape the company’s culture in India alongside the leaders of tomorrow.

Why Hyderabad

Stolt-Nielsen weighed up three Indian cities: Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Pune. Hyderabad came out ahead once the team compared talent availability, infrastructure and how easily it connects to Stolt-Nielsen’s offices around the world.

Turning a blank canvas into something real

Before any hiring began, Mohit says the team had to agree on fundamentals: why DICe existed in the first place (cost, talent, round-the-clock delivery, genuine R&D, or some mix of all four).

Hiring started with leadership. “Get this right above all else,” Mohit says. “Hire someone who can genuinely bridge the parent company’s domain and modern tech practice, not a generic delivery-centre GM.” Employer branding mattered just as much. A new centre in Hyderabad competes for talent with every other global capability centre in the city, so being upfront about what DICe actually is became a recruiting asset in its own right.

From there, the focus shifted to quick wins: moving into a permanent office as soon as possible, making sure it looked and felt like a Stolt-Nielsen office and a cohesive part of the business, and picking a handful of high-visibility projects rather than trying to serve every part of the business at once.

Keeping The Stolt Way alive from Hyderabad

Mohit is deliberate about turning The Stolt Way, Stolt-Nielsen’s long-held of values, into daily practice at DICe. He doesn’t want to simply paint them on a new tech centre’s walls. “Commit to go further” means engineers who flag the underlying issue, not just close the ticket. “Collaborate for success” means pairing Hyderabad directly with the business units it serves. “Create solutions” means rewarding people who spot a better way, not only those who deliver what was asked. “Act pragmatically” means choosing a handful of high-visibility projects and delivering them well, rather than trying to serve every part of the business at once.

The risk he watches for most closely is engineers building software for tankers and terminals they’ve never seen or don’t understand well enough. To close that gap, he’s bringing business stakeholders to Hyderabad to speak with the team directly and arranging site visits where possible. He also wants the team to treat Stolt-Nielsen’s history as living context, not corporate trivia. The company has a long history of innovation, dating back to 1959, and DICe is how that continues. Building technology for a business with that heritage means respecting what came before, while being brave enough to keep changing it.

Building a team that challenges the status quo

DICe is currently hiring across artificial intelligence, data engineering, data science, software engineering, DevOps, QA and specialist platforms including Oracle, Reltio and MS Dynamics. We look for people who help shape how the team works, not just execute against an existing playbook: engineers curious enough to understand how a tanker voyage or a terminal actually runs, comfortable being the digital voice in a room of commercially minded colleagues, and confident enough to say when a request is solving the wrong problem.

That extends to how the team operates day to day. “We share what we know, say what we think, and try what we’re unsure of, and we treat all three as normal, not risky,” Mohit says. He’s clear that it starts with how he responds as a leader. He rewards bad news delivered early, junior colleagues who challenge his thinking, and experiments that don’t work out, rather than only celebrating the wins.

The pitch to future joiners

Ask Mohit what makes DICe different from a typical tech job or consultancy, and he doesn’t hesitate. “You build things that matter physically, not just digitally,” he says. DICe’s work supports Stolt-Nielsen’s businesses worldwide, from route planning and fuel efficiency at Stolt Tankers to terminal operations at Stolthaven Terminals, tank container logistics at Stolt Tank Containers and monitoring at Stolt Sea Farm. Engineers here live with what they build in production, rather than handing over a recommendation and moving to the next client. And because the centre is still new, early joiners have an outsized say in how things get built and what “good” looks like.

For Mohit, that combination of real-world impact, ownership and a genuine hand in shaping culture is what DICe offers that a more established tech employer can’t.

DICe is actively hiring in Hyderabad.