Engineering Manager / Lead

About the role

You'll join a growing engineering team as a Lead Engineer / Architect, leading a small team in India and working closely with engineering teams in the US and Mexico. You'll be responsible for driving technical execution, solving complex engineering problems, and leading a team to build, deliver, and maintain reliable software.

This is a hands-on leadership role for someone with strong backend engineering expertise who can also contribute across the stack when needed.

Location: Hyderabad

Work Mode: Hybrid

What you'll do

• Lead a small engineering team in India, driving day-to-day technical execution and delivery
• Work closely with teams in the US and Mexico to plan, develop, and deliver software
• Design and build robust, scalable backend systems using .NET
• Own technical decisions around architecture, implementation, and engineering best practices
• Contribute across the full stack when needed.
• Break down complex technical problems and drive them through to implementation and delivery
• Mentor engineers and help maintain a high standard of engineering quality
• Collaborate with distributed teams and communicate technical decisions clearly

What we're looking for

• 8+ years of software engineering experience, with experience in a lead-level role
• 2+ years of experience leading a team
• Strong, hands-on expertise in .NET and backend engineering
• Strong understanding of software architecture and scalable backend systems
• Full-stack experience is preferred, with React being a plus
• Experience leading a small engineering team and driving technical delivery
• Excellent communication skills, particularly when working with distributed teams
• Strong problem-solving skills and a hands-on approach to engineering
• AI expertise is a plus
• Experience with payment systems or payment-related products is a plus

Who you are

• You take ownership and drive work through to completion
• You're hands-on and enjoy solving challenging engineering problems
• You're curious, resourceful, and always looking to learn
• You communicate clearly and work well with teams across different locations
• You lead by example and help the team deliver high-quality work

Strong Engineering Manager / Lead Profiles

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Mandatory (Experience 1) – Must have minimum 8+ years of overall Software Engineering / Development experience with a strong IC foundation.

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Mandatory (Experience 2) – Must have 2+ years of formal Engineering Manager experience with direct people-management responsibility (informal Senior Engineer / Tech Lead experience managing a team does not count)

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Mandatory (Experience 3) – Must have directly managed 4–6+ engineers, including 1:1s, performance management, growth plans, promotions, mentoring, and team development.

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Mandatory (Experience 4) – Must own technical direction and delivery for an engineering team/pod, including architecture, system design, code/PR reviews, execution planning, and engineering quality.

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Mandatory (Experience 5) – Must have strong backend/software engineering experience with hands-on technical depth in building APIs, services, integrations, and scalable systems; specific language/framework can vary.

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Mandatory (Experience 6) – Must have experience owning production operations, including on-call, incident management, debugging, and postmortems for their area.

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Mandatory (Experience 7) – Must have experience driving cross-functional alignment with Product and Design and translating ambiguous business/product requirements into scalable technical solutions.

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Mandatory (Company) – Must be from a Product Company / Startup, particularly B2B SaaS, Fintech, Payments, or similar technology product environments. (Refer Target Company List)

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Mandatory (Role Fit) – Role is 80% people/team management and 20% technical/IC involvement;

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Preferred (Education) - Tier 1 engineering college

Strong Engineering Manager / Lead Profiles

2

Mandatory (Experience 1) – Must have minimum 8+ years of overall Software Engineering / Development experience with a strong IC foundation.

3

Mandatory (Experience 2) – Must have 2+ years of formal Engineering Manager experience with direct people-management responsibility (informal Senior Engineer / Tech Lead experience managing a team does not count)

4

Mandatory (Experience 3) – Must have directly managed 4–6+ engineers, including 1:1s, performance management, growth plans, promotions, mentoring, and team development.

5

Mandatory (Experience 4) – Must own technical direction and delivery for an engineering team/pod, including architecture, system design, code/PR reviews, execution planning, and engineering quality.

6

Mandatory (Experience 5) – Must have strong backend/software engineering experience with hands-on technical depth in building APIs, services, integrations, and scalable systems; specific language/framework can vary.

7

Mandatory (Experience 6) – Must have experience owning production operations, including on-call, incident management, debugging, and postmortems for their area.

8

Mandatory (Experience 7) – Must have experience driving cross-functional alignment with Product and Design and translating ambiguous business/product requirements into scalable technical solutions.

9

Mandatory (Company) – Must be from a Product Company / Startup, particularly B2B SaaS, Fintech, Payments, or similar technology product environments. (Refer Target Company List)

10

Mandatory (Role Fit) – Role is 80% people/team management and 20% technical/IC involvement;

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Preferred (Education) - Tier 1 engineering college

We are looking for a hands-on Engineering Lead who can own backend engineering, DevOps, and delivery management.

This is not a coordination-only role. You will contribute technically while establishing the processes, accountability, and

operating rhythm needed for predictable delivery. You will manage multiple engineers and effectively use AI coding

agents and automation tools to improve the team's output without compromising quality.

Key Responsibilities

• Own the architecture, development, deployment, and reliability of our backend systems.

• Lead engineers through clear goals, task breakdowns, ownership, reviews, and regular feedback.

• Establish a process-oriented delivery system covering planning, estimation, execution, testing, release, and

retrospectives.

• Translate product requirements into technical plans, milestones, dependencies, and measurable deliverables.

• Track execution proactively, identify delivery risks early, and communicate status clearly.

• Remain hands-on with critical development, debugging, architecture, code reviews, and production issues.

• Own CI/CD, infrastructure, observability, deployment practices, and operational readiness.

• Improve engineering quality through coding standards, automated testing, documentation, and review processes.

• Delegate work effectively across team members according to their strengths and development needs.

• Use AI coding agents and engineering automation to parallelise suitable work, while reviewing and validating all

outputs.

• Build a culture of accountability in which work has clear owners, acceptance criteria, deadlines, and definitions of

done.

• Collaborate closely with product and business stakeholders to balance speed, scope, quality, and technical debt.

What We Are Looking For

• 4+ years of backend engineering experience.

• At least 2 years of experience leading or managing an engineering team.

• Strong hands-on backend development experience with modern backend technologies and frameworks.

• Practical experience with cloud infrastructure, DevOps, CI/CD, containers, monitoring, and production operations.

• Experience working in a mature, process-oriented engineering environment.

• Demonstrated ability to improve delivery predictability and engineering throughput.

• Strong understanding of agile planning, estimation, sprint execution, incident management, and retrospectives.

• Ability to manage multiple people and concurrent streams of work.• Experience reviewing architecture, pull requests, test plans, and production-readiness requirements.

• Strong written and verbal communication skills.

• Ability to give direct, constructive feedback and hold team members accountable.

• Sound judgement about when to build, delegate, automate, or reduce scope.

AI-Assisted Engineering

The ideal candidate should be comfortable incorporating AI into the software-development lifecycle. This includes:

• Breaking work into tasks that can be delegated safely to coding agents.

• Running multiple human and agent-led workstreams concurrently.

• Providing agents with clear context, constraints, and acceptance criteria.

• Reviewing generated code for correctness, security, maintainability, and architectural fit.

• Using automation to accelerate testing, documentation, refactoring, and operational workflows.

• Measuring whether AI tooling produces genuine delivery improvements.

We do not expect blind reliance on generated output. The Engineering Lead remains accountable for the quality and

correctness of everything shipped by the team.

Success in the First 90 Days

• Understand the existing architecture, infrastructure, team capabilities, and delivery bottlenecks.

• Take ownership of backend and DevOps execution.

• Introduce a consistent planning, tracking, review, and release cadence.

• Establish visibility into ownership, progress, dependencies, and delivery risks.

• Improve CI/CD, testing, monitoring, and production-readiness practices.

• Create an effective delegation model across engineers and AI agents.

• Deliver at least one meaningful product or platform milestone predictably from planning through production.

Nice to Have

• Experience scaling an early-stage or growing engineering team.

• Experience hiring, mentoring, and performance-managing engineers.

• Experience with infrastructure as code, security practices, and cloud-cost optimisation.

• Experience managing migrations, reliability improvements, or legacy-system modernisation.

• Previous experience introducing AI-assisted development workflows into an engineering team.

Celeco Labs is hiring a hands-on Head of Engineering on behalf of a confidential client in the housing-finance sector.

This is a role for an engineer who wants to own delivery, not only manage it. You will set the technical direction, build and maintain production systems, and work closely with the business team. You should be comfortable taking a requirement from the first discussion through technical planning, implementation, release, and production support.

What you will do

• Own the engineering roadmap and help decide what should be built first.

• Design, build, and maintain reliable customer-facing products and internal systems.

• Write production code and review code written by others.

• Turn business requirements into clear technical plans and releases.

• Choose practical architecture, tools, and vendors that fit the company's needs.

• Set working standards for testing, deployment, monitoring, backups, and access control.

• Protect customer and company data through practical security controls.

• Investigate production issues and make sure the same problems do not repeat.

• Help hire and guide a small engineering team as the company grows.

What we are looking for

• 3–5 years of professional software-engineering experience.

• Experience building and running production systems.

• Strong backend skills, including APIs, databases, and cloud services.

• Enough frontend knowledge to work across a product when needed.

• Good judgment about system design, security, reliability, and cost.

• The ability to explain technical choices in simple language.

• Comfort working independently and taking full ownership of delivery.

Experience in lending, housing finance, fintech, or another regulated industry is useful, but not required. Experience leading engineers or working directly with founders and business leaders is also useful.

How to apply

Please share your CV or LinkedIn profile and two short examples of production systems you have owned. This is a confidential search. More information about the company will be shared with shortlisted candidates during the interview process.

About the role

You will be a pivotal member of the leadership team, responsible for driving the company's product and platform strategy while overseeing engineering excellence across AI, data, platform, DevOps and infrastructure. This is a mission-critical role for an engineering leader who is both strategic and hands-on, and who can build scalable technologies for global enterprise clients in a fast-paced innovation ecosystem.

Reports to: CEO · Location: Bengaluru, India — hybrid, 3 days a week in office

What you will do

Technology & product leadership

• Define and drive the technology vision, architecture and long-term platform roadmap.
• Oversee the architecture, design and delivery of highly scalable enterprise systems.
• Ensure engineering excellence, velocity and reliability across the product lifecycle.

Engineering & platform management

• Lead platform engineering, product technology, DevOps, infrastructure and Quality Engineering.
• Build robust cloud-native systems using the Azure, AWS and GCP ecosystems.
• Oversee operational effectiveness, including uptime, production reliability and cost optimisation.

Innovation & AI strategy

• Spearhead Mission AI by developing scalable, production-grade AI/ML and GenAI capabilities.
• Own the GenAI/LLM solutions architecture.
• Core specialisation in AI agents and autonomous workflows, data extraction and intelligent automation.
• Direct hands-on architectural oversight of large language models, applied AI and multi-layered deep learning products.
• Extensive expertise in building intelligent document automation systems — similar in complexity to patent parsing, legal workflow automation and structured decision intelligence tools.

Technical leadership

• A proven track record overseeing product architecture, tech strategy and cross-functional engineering execution across core full-stack and AI platforms.
• Collaborate with executive leadership on business strategy, client requirements and product delivery.
• Build, mentor and scale high-performing engineering teams with a growth mindset.
• Establish a strong technology culture grounded in ownership, innovation and continuous learning.

What success looks like

• Mission AI: build a world-class AI system leveraging GenAI, ML and enterprise-grade data engineering.
• Hyper-scaling: architect and scale the platform to match global industry leaders in the IP space.
• Culture building: develop a strong engineering organisation with high ownership, performance and innovation DNA.

Qualifications & experience

• Preferably under 15 years of enterprise software engineering experience across B2B SaaS or technology-first companies; fewer is fine for an exceptional engineer.
• A proven track record of taking early-stage AI/ML prototypes and scaling them into robust enterprise SaaS platforms featuring multi-agent orchestration, complex workflows and decision intelligence.
• Experienced in building and mentoring agile, lean startup teams of full-stack and machine learning engineers from the ground up.
• Proven leadership in defining and executing technology strategy and platform roadmaps.
• Extensive cloud-native engineering experience with Azure, AWS and GCP.

Technical expertise

• Strong full-stack engineering background (Java, Python, JavaScript frameworks).
• Expertise with JS frameworks such as React, Angular and Node.js.
• Experience building and scaling distributed systems and microservices.
• Strong knowledge of databases (SQL, NoSQL), data modelling and unstructured data management.
• Strong understanding of Agile methodologies and tools (Atlassian, Git, CI/CD pipelines).

Behavioural & leadership competencies

• Product and delivery management expertise, end to end, including delivery and customer support.
• Excellent communication, with the ability to influence executive stakeholders.
• High technical proficiency combined with strong business acumen.
• Strong analytical and decision-making skills.

Job Description:

Head of Engineering — Chennai (Onsite)About the Role

Job Details

Position: Head of Engineering

Department: Engineering

Experience: 6–8 Years

Employment Type: Full-time

Location: Chennai, On-site

Salary: Up to ₹24,00,000 per annum

About the Role

We’re looking for a Head of Engineering to take end-to-end ownership of engineering for a fast-moving product. You’ll be responsible for architecture, execution, product quality, engineering culture, and team growth.

This is a hands-on leadership role. You’ll spend approximately 60% of your time coding and reviewing code and 40% on product, people, and engineering leadership.

What You’ll Do

• Own engineering end to end, including architecture, development, delivery, quality, and hiring.
• Stay hands-on with the codebase, spending roughly 60% of your time writing and reviewing code.
• Establish and continuously improve the engineering workflow: how the team plans, builds, reviews, ships, and measures.
• Improve development velocity and reduce cycle time without compromising product quality.
• Drive AI-assisted software development across the engineering team using Claude Code and similar agentic coding tools as a core productivity lever.
• Establish practical systems and workflows that demonstrate measurable improvements in engineering throughput.
• Work closely with the founders on product strategy, technical trade-offs, priorities, and what to build next.
• Build, mentor, and scale a high-performing engineering team.

What We’re Looking For

• 6–8 years of professional software engineering experience.
• Experience taking at least one product from zero to launch.
• Experience building and scaling at least one product to a large user base.
• Strong hands-on expertise in Python and Node.js.
• Comfortable working with React Native / Expo.
• Strong understanding of PostgreSQL and database fundamentals.
• Previous experience leading a small engineering team.
• A leadership style based on ownership and technical example, rather than simply assigning tickets.
• Daily experience with agentic coding tools, with the ability to demonstrate how they have improved development speed and team throughput.
• Strong product instincts and the ability to form opinions about user problems, not just technical implementation.
• Based in Chennai or willing to relocate.

How We Work

We operate with high pace, high ownership, and short feedback loops.

You’ll be expected to get close to the product, understand the users, make decisions quickly, and ship within your first week.

If you enjoy building products from the ground up, staying close to the code, and using AI to fundamentally improve how engineering teams work, we’d love to hear from you.

How to Apply

Join Aura Gold and be part of building a high-performing team from the ground up!

Ability to commute/relocate:

• Chennai, Tamil Nadu (Chennai, Chennai District): Reliably commute or planning to relocate before starting work (Preferred)

Education:

• Bachelor's (Preferred)

Language:

• English, Tamil , Hindi (Required)

Location:

• Chennai, Tamil Nadu (Chennai, Chennai District) (Required)

Work Location: In person