Founding Head of Engineering

We're an ambitious, AI‑native company in prop commerce. We move fast, build pragmatically, and care about craft. This role is for a tech maverick who prefers code over calendar invites and prototypes before pontificating.

Location: Mumbai 

Type: Full‑time

Role: Founding, hands‑on IC (no people management to start)

Why this role exists (and why now)

We're entering a heavy build phase. The next 12–18 months are about turning hard, ambiguous problems into robust systems with real users. We need someone who can personally solve the complex pieces first, then turn those solutions into reusable patterns that the team can scale.

If you've ever thought, "I could build that in a week," and then actually did - you'll thrive here.

What you'll own in the first 6 months

• AI platform capabilities: Design and implement gen‑AI services (prompt orchestration, retrieval, tool/function calling, streaming UX) with evaluation and guardrails.
• High‑throughput content processing: Build reliable ingestion/processing pipelines, storage, and delivery with strong observability and cost control.
• Identity, privacy, and trust: Implement consent‑driven flows, signed links/tokens, rate‑limits, audit trails, and abuse prevention.
• Data platform: Ingest and normalize external data, model entities/relationships, and expose a clean query layer for apps and partners.
• Product surfaces (MVP → v1): Ship crisp, modern UIs and APIs for internal/external stakeholders, with performance and reliability budgets.
• Operational excellence: Logs/metrics/traces, automated tests, incident runbooks, and a sane release cadence.

What success looks like

• You ship: Demos weekly, releases bi‑weekly, and "one‑pager + prototype" before big bets.
• You teach by doing: You crack the hairy part, document it, and only then scale it through patterns others can reuse.
• You sweat the edges: Correctness, latency, safety, and failure modes matter - especially for AI features.

Your toolkit

• Core: TypeScript/Node, Python; React/Next.js; Postgres/Supabase; Cloudflare/Vercel; Redis; object storage + CDN.
• AI: OpenAI/Anthropic; vector search (pgvector/Pinecone); pragmatic frameworks (LangChain/LlamaIndex); eval/observability (LangSmith/W&B); prompt versioning and guardrails.
• Data/Infra: Airbyte/dbt or bespoke pipelines; message queues; feature flags; OpenTelemetry/Grafana/Datadog.
• Nice: Framer/WeWeb/Lovable for rapid UI when appropriate; Firebase where it fits.

Must‑haves

• 6–10+ years building production systems as the primary builder (titles < commits). Exceptional earlier‑career builders welcome with proof.
• Evidence of turning ambiguous product problems into working software in days, not quarters .
• Hands‑on gen‑AI experience (retrieval, tools, streaming, evals) with real users — and lessons from failures.
• Strong systems thinking: data models, consistency trade‑offs, perf budgets, failure handling.
• Security and privacy instincts: PII handling, consent, audit trails, regulatory awareness.
• Excellent written communication: crisp docs, READMEs, runbooks.

Great‑to‑haves

• Media processing at scale (transcoding, adaptive delivery, captioning).
• Marketplace/fintech‑style trust & safety (risk signals, abuse prevention, KYC‑adjacent flows).
• Data engineering craft: ETL/ELT, entity resolution, schema design.
• Growth engineering: instrumentation, ranking, experimentation.

What you won't do (to start)

• Manage people. This is a player‑coach IC role. You'll set the bar via code and patterns, not calendars.
• Architect by slide deck. Your design docs end in merged PRs and measurable user impact.

Career path & title

Start as Founding Head of Engineering (IC) . As we scale, choose either:

• Principal/Distinguished IC track (maximize technical leverage), or
• CTO/VP Eng path once a team exists and needs management.

Compensation

Competitive salary + meaningful ESOP . We are biased toward outsized ownership for outsized builders. 4‑year vest (1‑year cliff); accelerated vesting possible for milestone‑based outcomes.