Craft My Plate

CraftMyPlate is a Hyderabad-based platform for micro-events: house parties, birthdays, office celebrations, and small gatherings. One thing hasn't changed since day one. Every order comes from someone making a specific, personal decision: this occasion, this many people, this budget, this date. We win by understanding that decision better than anyone else does.

We are now investing in the systems (data, growth, and eventually AI-driven automation) that let us make that same quality of decision at scale, without needing to grow headcount just to keep up. That investment is partly backed by funding we recently brought in, but the funding is not the story. It simply means we can now hire someone senior enough to own this problem properly, instead of solving it in pieces.

If you join now, you are not joining a company that has already figured everything out and just needs someone to run the machine. You are joining at the point where the machine is still being designed. What you build in the next year will still be the foundation two years from now.

About the Role

We are hiring a Growth Lead to own two things at once: how many people know about us, and how much revenue that awareness turns into. Not one or the other. Both, as a single connected number.

Here is what makes this role different from most growth roles you have seen: the infrastructure is already built. Tracking, attribution, and engagement systems are already in place and working. Our content and performance teams already execute well within the current playbook. You are not being hired to set any of that up. You are being hired to direct it and extract return from it.

That means your job is judgment, not motion. You decide which channels get more budget and which get cut. You decide what message goes to which segment. You decide what "working" means, and you prove it with numbers, not activity. The team executes. You are accountable for the return.

We need someone who has done this before, at a company where marketing spend had to answer to revenue, not just to reach. Someone who can point to a previous role and say plainly: this is what we spent, this is what we made back, and this is what I specifically changed to move that number.

What "Good" Looks Like (Market Standard)

This is not a vague "be strategic" ask. In most growth-stage consumer companies, a Growth Lead's performance is judged against a small set of hard numbers. We expect the same here:

• Return on ad spend (ROAS) or marketing efficiency ratio (MER) improving quarter over quarter across paid channels, not just held flat
• CAC to LTV ratio healthy enough to support scaling spend, not just acquiring volume (a commonly cited industry bar is a ratio meaningfully above 1:3, CAC to LTV)
• CAC payback period short enough that growth doesn't starve cash flow
• Blended revenue attributable to marketing-led channels, tracked and defended, not assumed
• A steady pace of new channel or approach tests per quarter, with a clear kill or scale decision made on each one, not experiments left to run forever without a verdict

If these terms are unfamiliar to you or you have never been held to them, this is probably not the right role yet. If you already think in these terms by habit, this role gives you the platform to prove it at a larger scale.

What You'll Own

• Awareness and reach across channels: Grow how many of the right people know about us, across paid, organic, and content channels, without confusing reach for revenue
• Revenue and ROI: Own the return on every rupee spent across channels. You inherit working tracking systems (CleverTap, AppsFlyer, Mixpanel); your job is to use them to make better spend decisions, not to build or maintain them
• Segmentation strategy: Build and keep refining how we segment customers by occasion type, guest count, budget band, and lead time to event. Turn that into distinct messaging and targeting for each segment, not one-size-fits-all campaigns
• Growth and channel scaling: Identify, test, and scale marketing channels and approaches beyond what we currently run, with a clear view of what each one returns
• Team direction: Directly lead our content and performance marketing team. You set the direction and the bar. They execute against it. You are not doing their job for them, and you are not letting them run without direction either
• Reporting: Give the founders and CMO clear, ROI-level visibility. What is working, what isn't, what you are cutting, and what you are doubling down on, and why

Required Skills & Background

• A proven, quantifiable track record of improving marketing ROI at a previous company, across more than one channel, not just optimizing a single ad account. Able to state clearly what the return was before, what it became, and what they specifically did to move it.
• 5 to 8 years in marketing, with real time spent owning revenue and channel-level ROI, not just campaign execution
• Experience running and defending a multi-channel budget: knowing when to shift spend between awareness and performance channels based on what the numbers say
• Strong quantitative fluency. Comfortable reading cohort, retention, and attribution data (from tools like CleverTap, AppsFlyer, and Mixpanel) and turning it into a spend or strategy decision, without needing to build the pipelines themselves
• Demonstrated experience building segmentation-led marketing strategy. Able to show, concretely, how they tailored messaging to distinct customer segments in a past role
• Experience managing a team (content and/or performance). This role leads people, not just plans
• Tier-1 educational background (top B-school, or a top engineering institute with demonstrated growth ownership). Exceptions made for candidates with a clearly exceptional track record
• Consumer internet, D2C, e-commerce, or marketplace background strongly preferred. Extra credit for a business with real customer-segment diversity, not a single-SKU product

Good to Have

• Experience marketing a business where the customer's decision changes a lot by occasion, timing, or budget (events, travel, gifting, weddings)
• Experience balancing brand/awareness spend against direct-response spend, and defending that split with numbers
• Prior experience at an early-stage startup where they built the growth function rather than inheriting one
• Hands-on comfort reviewing ad creative and content briefs, even if they are not writing them personally

What We Offer

• Direct ownership of the marketing function, reporting to the founders and CMO
• Working infrastructure from day one: tracking, attribution, and engagement systems are already built, so you spend your time on strategy and ROI, not setup
• Competitive pay, with ESOP and ownership options so your upside grows with the company's
• A team that already executes well. Your job is to point it in the right direction, not build it from zero
• Real accountability: revenue and ROI, not vanity metrics
• Fast growth and more scope as the company scales

Read This Before Anything Else

We have 6 developers who can ship. What we don't have is someone who turns that into a real engineering function: real architecture, real leverage, real AI-driven advantage. If that gap sounds like an opportunity rather than a headache, you're in the right place. If it sounds like a lot of undefined work with no playbook handed to you, this one probably isn't for you. That's completely okay. There are plenty of great roles that fit differently.

About CraftMyPlate

CraftMyPlate is Hyderabad's go-to platform for food experiences for micro-events: house parties, birthdays, office celebrations, festive gatherings, and more. We're building the operating system for how India discovers, customises, and orders food for smaller events. We're backed by established founders and investors, and we're funded and growing fast. The next phase of that growth runs through engineering.

Where We Stand

Some numbers, because they matter more than adjectives. Order volume has grown 50x in two years, and we're compounding at roughly 3x year over year, without giving up equity to fund it. That means the business runs on its own economics. The growth is real demand, not runway bought with dilution, and every efficient architectural decision this role makes directly protects that.

Most people size up an opportunity by asking what's going to change in ten years. The more useful question, and the one this company is built around, is what won't change. People will keep gathering. They'll keep celebrating, hosting, and marking festivals, in 10 years and in 20. That permanence is the bet. You're not building infrastructure for a trend cycle. You're building for a category that outlasts the current AI wave, the next funding round, and probably us too.

The Technical Reality

Here's an honest read of the engineering problem, not a sanitized version of it.

Event-driven commerce doesn't scale like typical e-commerce. Demand isn't smooth, it's spiky: weekends, festival calendars, and event dates create real load concentration, and each order is tied to a hard deadline that can't slip the way a shipped package can. That has direct architectural consequences: systems need to handle bursty, unpredictable traffic without paying for idle capacity the rest of the time, which is exactly why we're serverless-first on AWS rather than running a fixed fleet sized for peak.

Underneath that, every order touches multiple systems that have to stay consistent: kitchen and vendor fulfillment status, inventory across partners, payment gateway settlement, and refunds, often in real time and often across more than one vendor for a single event. Getting that consistency right across SQL and NoSQL stores, without it becoming a source of support tickets and manual reconciliation, is a real architecture problem, not a CRUD problem.

The AI-agent layer is the next lever, and it's a business lever as much as a technical one. Every workflow we can hand to a well-orchestrated agent instead of a new hire is a workflow that scales without adding headcount, which is exactly how a company grows 3x a year without diluting equity to fund the team behind it. That's why agent orchestration across multiple LLMs, using LangGraph, sits in the "go deep" tier of this role rather than being a nice-to-have.

You'll likely find some of this framing right and some of it worth challenging once you're actually in the codebase. That's expected, and honestly preferred over someone who just nods along.

Why This Role Exists

You'll be the most senior technical person in the company, reporting directly to the founder. Not a manager brought in to run standups. An owner. You set the architecture, you write code yourself, and you make the team materially better. You also own where AI and automation take this company next, starting with our first in-house AI agent product (details shared in the interview), and expanding from there into how the company runs, department by department: HR, finance, marketing, design, development, all sitting on an engineering layer that you design.

If you've outgrown a role where you plan but don't build, or where good ideas die in a committee, this is built to be the opposite of that.

What You'll Own

• Architecture, end to end. Scalable, cost-efficient systems from day one, not "fix it later" engineering. You own the decisions and their long-term consequences.
• Hands-on building. You are still writing code and shipping. This isn't a seat where you review other people's work all day. You lead by building.
• The engineering team. Directly manage, mentor, and level up our 6 developers. Build the technical bar, the review culture, and the calibration that lets the team ship independently.
• The AI-agent roadmap. Own the architecture behind our first AI agent product, then the broader strategy for AI agents and automation across every function in the company, with engineering as the layer underneath all of it.
• Team scaling. Build the next layer of leads under you so execution quality scales without you being the bottleneck.
• Technical accountability. When something breaks, you fix it. You don't escalate and wait.

Our Stack, and the Depth We Expect

Not everything on this list needs the same level of mastery. Some of it you need to own at an architectural level. The rest you need to be strong enough to build yourself, direct the team on, or delegate to AI agents with confidence.

Go deep here. This is where the real architecture decisions live, and where the business impact is highest:

• AWS, serverless first. You should be genuinely well versed in AWS application development, not just "have used AWS." You should be able to design and guide serverless architecture (Lambda, API Gateway, DynamoDB, Step Functions, and similar) as our default way of building, because our demand curve is spiky by nature and fixed infrastructure is money left on the table.
• TypeScript, our primary language across backend and frontend.
• Agent orchestration across multiple LLMs, using LangGraph. This is core to our AI roadmap and our path to scaling operations without scaling headcount. You own how it's architected, not just how it's used.

Working proficiency. Build it yourself, direct the team, or hand it to an AI agent and know if the output is right.

This Is You If

• You've built and shipped real production systems yourself, not just reviewed other people's architecture from a distance.
• You go deep wherever the problem is, and you're comfortable owning the exact stack described above, not just "full-stack" in the abstract.
• You've made engineers around you measurably better, whether or not you've held the title for it yet.
• You're already using AI coding tools and agents seriously, like Claude, Cursor, or similar tools, as part of how you build, not as something you tried once. We'll likely explore this together in the interview.
• You have a bias toward leverage over hours. You'd rather automate or systematize a problem than grind through it. But when something's live and needs to be done right, you see it through completely, with no half-finished work.
• You want to build something for years, not land somewhere comfortable. We'll know the difference from how you talk about your last three years.

This Might Not Be the Right Fit If

• You'd prefer a stable, well-defined role with clear boundaries and someone else making the calls. That's a fair thing to want, just not what this is.
• You'd rather receive direction than bring us architecture and AI strategy yourself.
• You haven't yet gotten hands-on with AI coding tools in your daily work.
• You're drawn more to the title than the work behind it.

If none of that sounds like you, we'd love to hear from you.

Requirements

• 5 to 7 years of experience in software engineering, with real ownership of architecture-level decisions, not just feature delivery.
• Prior experience leading or mentoring engineers, formally or informally.
• Tier-1 or Tier-1+ engineering college strongly preferred (IIT, BITS, top NIT tier, or equivalent). We'll consider other institutions only with clearly commendable, verifiable work: real systems you can walk us through in depth, strong open-source contributions, or a track record that speaks for itself. Pedigree is a proxy for speed, not a checkbox. We test for the underlying ability regardless.
• Comfortable in an early-stage environment: undefined problems, few processes, and the expectation that you help define both.

Compensation

Competitive, with equity. We're formalizing a structured ESOP program alongside this hire. Specific numbers are discussed directly in later interview rounds.

If reading this got you a little excited about what you'd build here, we'd genuinely love to talk. If it didn't quite land, no hard feelings. We just want the right fit for both sides.