Lead Engineer

Lead Engineer (Backend-Heavy) 
Experience: 4+ Years (Must have)

What We're Building

Most AI design tools can generate beautiful screens, but very few help teams turn ideas into products that actually reach production. We're building an AI-powered product platform that bridges the gap between product thinking, design, and engineering. By understanding an application's context, design system, documentation, and existing workflows, our platform helps teams make better product decisions and transform ideas into production-ready outcomes.
We're an early-stage, venture-backed startup based in Bengaluru, working at the intersection of AI, product, and design. Our team consists of experienced engineers, designers, product thinkers, and growth professionals who thrive in a fast-paced environment, value ownership, and focus on building products that deliver real customer impact.
If you're excited about shaping the future of AI-powered product development and want to work on challenging problems with a high degree of ownership, we'd love to hear from you.

How We Work
We're a team of 12, shipping to enterprise customers. You'll have more ownership than most engineers get across an entire career.
● Understand it deeply. Talk to users before writing code.
● Build it. Stay current, move fast, monitor what you ship — know why it's working or why it isn't.
● Ship it. A feature nobody uses isn't a feature.
● No process layers — work directly with the founder + CTO.

Your Job in One Line
Own the entire technical stack. Set how this team builds. Make the calls, everything else gets built on.

What You'll Do
● Own the platform architecture — React frontend, two backend systems (Node.js microservices + Python AI agents), multi-provider LLM orchestration on LangGraph, infra on AWS.
● Make the hard calls. What gets cached in Redis, what lives in Postgres, what goes in MongoDB, how state flows between the AI agents and the UI, where we go real-time vs async, when to build vs use what already exists.
● Set how the team works with code. Coding agents, Cursor workflows, linting pipelines, monorepo structure, CI/CD. You define the engineering culture here.
● Architect how the AI layer plugs in. You design the contracts, the orchestration, and how intelligence flows through the platform. Our AI engineer owns the depth inside those contracts — you own how it all fits together and stays clean.
● Delete unnecessary things. Keep the system simple.
● Ship end-to-end. Talk to users. Understand why something feels broken and fix the actual cause, not the symptom.

What You Need to Know
We don't expect one person to be the deepest in the world at all of this. The first three are non-negotiable. The rest is upside.
Must have
● System design & architecture. Whiteboard a system from scratch and defend every choice. State management across frontend and backend — what lives where, and why. API design that stays clean as you scale; microservices — when to split, when to merge, when to leave it alone. Know when to optimize and when to ship ugly and fix later.
● JavaScript / TypeScript (deep). You understand the runtime — event loop, async patterns, memory, performance. Node.js + Express for full microservices (auth, payments, file handling, real-time, API gateway). TypeScript as a way to model your domain properly.
● Databases & data layer. Schema design across Postgres and MongoDB — Indexing, trade-offs, knowing when to use which. Caching with Redis. Data-access patterns that hold up under enterprise load.
Good to have
● React & Frontend. React 18+, component architecture that scales. State layers — local vs global vs server vs cached (Redux Toolkit, Context). Real-time via Socket.IO/SSE for streaming AI responses and collaboration. Comfort with rich editors, node-based UIs, and in-browser code editing.
● Python & AI orchestration. FastAPI or equivalent — async, clean. Enough LLM orchestration to architect it well — LangGraph, multi-agent flows, tool calling. Multi-provider integration (Claude, GPT, Gemini) so switching models is a config
change.

What Matters More Than Your Resume
● You've built something real from scratch and can walk through every decision.
● You think in systems, in product, in user experience — all at once.
● You care how things feel, how they work, and why they break.
● You've operated with high ownership before — maybe a different title, but this energy.
This is a founding role. You architect it, you build it, you own it — and you shape everything around it.

Role Basics
Experience: 4+ years of actually shipping things that mattered.
Location: Bangalore, HSR Layout. Work from the office, 5 days a week.
Reporting line: Reports to the CTO.

Interview Process
1. Coding round. A hands-on problem. Clean, working code.
2. System design. Whiteboard a real problem live — we're watching how you think and solve, not just where you land.
3. Culture fit. How you work, what you take ownership of, why you build.