Technical Lead/Architect

About the Role

We are seeking a hands-on Tech Lead to design, build, and integrate AI-driven systems that automate and enhance real-world business workflows. This is a high-impact role for someone who enjoys full-stack ownership — from backend AI architecture to frontend user experiences — and can align engineering decisions with measurable product outcomes.

You will begin as a strong individual contributor, independently architecting and deploying AI-powered solutions. As the product portfolio scales, you will lead a distributed team across India and Australia, acting as a System Integrator to align engineering, data, and AI contributions into cohesive production systems.

Example Project

Design and deploy a multi-agent AI system to automate critical stages of a company’s sales cycle, including:

• Generating client proposals using historical SharePoint data and CRM insights
• Summarizing meeting transcripts
• Drafting follow-up communications
• Feeding structured insights into dashboards and workflow tools

The solution will combine RAG pipelines, LLM reasoning, and React-based interfaces to deliver measurable productivity gains.

Key Responsibilities

• Architect and implement AI workflows using LLMs, vector databases, and automation frameworks
• Act as a System Integrator, coordinating deliverables across distributed engineering and AI teams
• Develop frontend interfaces using React/JavaScript to enable seamless human-AI collaboration
• Design APIs and microservices integrating AI systems with enterprise platforms (SharePoint, Teams, Databricks, Azure)
• Drive architecture decisions balancing scalability, performance, and security
• Collaborate with product managers, clients, and data teams to translate business use cases into production-ready systems
• Mentor junior engineers and evolve into a broader leadership role as the team grows

Ideal Candidate Profile

Experience Requirements

• 5+ years in full-stack development (Python backend + React/JavaScript frontend)
• Strong experience in API and microservice integration
• 2+ years leading technical teams and coordinating distributed engineering efforts
• 1+ year of hands-on AI project experience (LLMs, Transformers, LangChain, OpenAI/Azure AI frameworks)
• Prior experience in B2B SaaS environments, particularly in AI, automation, or enterprise productivity solutions

Technical Expertise

• Designing and implementing AI workflows including RAG pipelines, vector databases, and prompt orchestration
• Ensuring backend and AI systems are scalable, reliable, observable, and secure
• Familiarity with enterprise integrations (SharePoint, Teams, Databricks, Azure)
• Experience building production-grade AI systems within enterprise SaaS ecosystems

Job Description: Tech Lead – AI & Technology

Role Title: Tech Lead – AI & Technology

Location: Bangalore, India – Fully On-site

Experience: 5+ Years

Employment Type: Full-time

About the Role

We are looking for an experienced and hands-on Tech Lead to lead a small engineering team and drive the development of AI-powered applications, internal technology platforms, and modern IT solutions. The Tech Lead will be responsible for technical direction, architecture, development, code quality, team management, and end-to-end delivery of technology projects. The ideal candidate should have strong programming experience, particularly in Python and ReactJS, along with practical experience working with AI/ML technologies.

1. Technical Leadership & Team Management

• Lead and mentor a team of developers and technical team members.
• Own technical delivery across multiple projects and initiatives.
• Assign tasks, review progress, resolve technical blockers, and ensure timely delivery.
• Conduct code reviews and establish engineering best practices.
• Mentor team members and support their technical growth.

2. Software Development & Architecture

• Design and develop scalable, secure, and maintainable applications.
• Lead backend development using Python and frontend development using ReactJS.
• Define application architecture, technology choices, APIs, integrations, and development standards.
• Review technical designs and ensure high-quality implementation.
• Troubleshoot complex technical issues and drive effective solutions.

3. AI & Technology

• Lead the development and integration of AI-powered applications and solutions.
• Work with AI/ML models, APIs, LLMs, Generative AI, and related technologies.
• Evaluate emerging AI tools and technologies and identify opportunities for practical implementation.
• Collaborate with product and business teams to translate requirements into AI-enabled technology solutions.

4. Project Delivery

• Own the complete technology lifecycle from requirements and architecture to development, testing, deployment, and maintenance.
• Plan sprints, estimate development efforts, and track technical milestones.
• Work closely with cross-functional stakeholders to understand requirements and deliver solutions.
• Ensure projects meet timelines, quality standards, security requirements, and performance expectations.

5. Engineering Quality & Infrastructure

• Establish standards for coding, testing, documentation, version control, and deployment.
• Ensure applications are scalable, reliable, and secure. l Collaborate on cloud infrastructure, APIs, databases, CI/CD, and deployment processes.
• Identify opportunities to improve system performance and engineering efficiency.

Technical Skills – Must Have

• 5+ years of software development experience.
• Strong hands-on experience with Python.
• Strong experience with ReactJS / React.
• Experience leading or managing technical team members.
• Strong understanding of AI/ML and Generative AI technologies.
• Experience with APIs, databases, Git, and software development lifecycle.
• Strong understanding of application architecture and system design.
• Experience building and deploying production-grade applications.

Technical Skills – Good to Have

• Experience with LLMs, RAG, AI agents, or Generative AI applications.
• Experience with cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure, or GCP.
• Experience with Docker, CI/CD, and DevOps practices.
• Experience integrating third-party AI APIs and services.
• Experience working in startups or fast-paced technology environments.

What We Are Looking For

• Strong technical ownership and problem-solving ability.
• Ability to balance hands-on coding with team leadership.
• Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills.
• Ability to mentor developers and drive accountability within the team
• Strong interest in AI and emerging technologies.
• A proactive, ownership-driven approach with the ability to work in a fast-paced environment.

Why Join Us?

• Work on AI-powered technology with meaningful social impact.
• Lead a small, high-ownership technology team.
• Work across AI, software engineering, and modern IT infrastructure.
• Opportunity to shape technology architecture and engineering practices from the ground up.
• Collaborative and fast-moving environment with significant technical ownership.

Technical Architect – Product Engineering

Experience: 15+ Years

Location: Pune, India

Employment Type: Full-time

Desired Skills: Python, Technical Architecture, AWS, Microservices, SaaS / Multi-tenant Architecture, Kubernetes, System Design

About the Role

We are looking for a Senior Technical Architect to lead the architecture, design, and technical evolution of an enterprise SaaS product. This is a hands-on leadership role requiring deep technical expertise, strong product engineering experience, and the ability to build scalable, secure, and high-performance platforms.

The ideal candidate should be passionate about solving complex engineering problems, driving innovation, mentoring development teams, and effectively leveraging AI to accelerate software development.

Key Responsibilities

• Own the overall product architecture and technical roadmap.
• Design and build scalable, secure, and highly available enterprise applications.
• Lead the design and implementation of new product features from concept to production.
• Remain hands-on with coding and contribute to critical product components.
• Drive architecture reviews, code quality, performance optimization, and engineering best practices.
• Lead cloud architecture, security, scalability, and DevOps initiatives.
• Evaluate and adopt modern technologies to improve product capabilities and engineering efficiency.
• Leverage AI tools (ChatGPT, GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Claude, etc.) to accelerate software development, code reviews, testing, documentation, debugging, and productivity.

Required Skills & Qualifications

• 15+ years of software product engineering experience with at least 5 years in a Technical Architect role.
• Strong hands-on expertise in Python and modern backend frameworks.
• Deep experience with AWS services and cloud-native application architecture.
• Strong understanding of DevOps, CI/CD pipelines, Infrastructure as Code (Terraform/CloudFormation), Docker, Kubernetes, and container orchestration.
• Experience designing microservices, REST APIs, event-driven architectures, and distributed systems.
• Strong knowledge of SQL and NoSQL databases.
• Experience with scalable SaaS platforms, multi-tenant architectures, and secure application design.
• Excellent understanding of software design patterns, performance tuning, observability, and system reliability.
• Strong analytical, problem-solving, and decision-making skills.

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 Title: Technical Lead

Experience: 6+ Years

Job Type: Full-Time

Department: Engineering

Job Location: Sec-62, Noida.

Job Summary

We are looking for an experienced and hands-on Technical Lead with strong software engineering expertise and a proven track record of building scalable, secure, and production-grade web applications.

The ideal candidate will have 6+ years of software development experience, strong expertise across modern frontend and backend technologies, and the ability to take end-to-end technical ownership—from architecture and development through deployment and production support.

The role requires a technically hands-on leader who can provide architectural direction, mentor developers, review code, solve complex engineering challenges, and ensure high standards of engineering quality.

Practical knowledge of AI/GenAI technologies is important. Prior experience in the Indian FinTech/BFSI ecosystem will be strongly preferred.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead the technical design, architecture, development, and delivery of web-based applications.
• Take end-to-end technical ownership of projects, ensuring scalable, maintainable, secure, and high-quality implementations.
• Work hands-on across frontend, backend, databases, APIs, cloud infrastructure, and third-party integrations.
• Define technical architecture, technology choices, coding standards, and engineering best practices.
• Conduct code reviews and ensure high standards of code quality, performance, security, and maintainability.
• Mentor developers and provide technical guidance throughout design and implementation.
• Identify technical risks, bottlenecks, scalability concerns, and architectural challenges early in the development lifecycle.
• Collaborate with Product Managers, Business Analysts, Designers, QA, DevOps, and other stakeholders to translate business requirements into effective technical solutions.

• Participate in effort estimation, sprint planning, technical discussions, and delivery planning.
• Troubleshoot complex production issues and drive root-cause analysis and permanent resolutions.
• Evaluate and introduce new technologies, frameworks, development practices, and AI-assisted engineering tools where appropriate.
• Identify opportunities to incorporate AI/GenAI capabilities into products, workflows, and internal engineering processes.
• Ensure applications follow appropriate practices for security, data privacy, authentication, authorization, logging, and monitoring.

Technical Skills & Requirements

Mandatory

• 6+ years of professional software development experience.
• Strong experience building and maintaining production-grade web applications.
• Strong proficiency in modern JavaScript/TypeScript ecosystems.
• Experience with frontend frameworks such as React.js, Next.js, Angular, Vue.js, or similar.
• Strong backend development experience using Node.js and/or other modern backend frameworks and languages.
• Strong understanding of REST APIs, microservices, API design, authentication, authorization, and third-party integrations.
• Experience with relational and/or NoSQL databases such as PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, Redis, etc.
• Good understanding of system design, distributed systems, scalability, caching, asynchronous processing, and performance optimization.
• Experience with cloud platforms such as AWS, GCP, or Azure.
• Familiarity with Docker, CI/CD pipelines, Git-based development workflows, monitoring, and modern DevOps practices.
• Strong understanding of application security and secure software development practices.

AI / GenAI Skills

The candidate should have a practical understanding of the modern AI ecosystem and its application in software products.

Experience or knowledge in the following areas will be an advantage:

• LLM-based applications and APIs
• OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, or similar AI platforms
• AI agents and agentic workflows
• RAG and vector databases
• Prompt engineering and structured outputs
• AI-assisted development tools
• Integration of AI capabilities into existing web applications

• Reliability, security, privacy, cost, and hallucination considerations in production AI systems

Deep AI/ML research experience is not mandatory. The candidate should, however, be comfortable understanding and integrating modern AI capabilities into software products.

FinTech / BFSI Experience – Preferred

Prior experience working with FinTech, BFSI, lending, payments, banking, insurance, credit, or financial services products in India will be strongly preferred.

Experience in any of the following areas will be particularly valuable:

• Digital lending / Loan Management Systems
• Payments and payment gateways
• Credit bureau and credit-score integrations
• KYC / eKYC and identity verification
• Account Aggregator ecosystem
• UPI / NPCI integrations
• Banking and NBFC integrations
• Financial APIs and third-party FinTech platforms
• RBI-related technology and compliance requirements
• Data security and privacy requirements for financial applications

Leadership & Soft Skills

• Proven ability to lead and mentor engineering teams.
• Strong problem-solving, debugging, and analytical capabilities.
• Ability to make sound technical and architectural decisions.
• Strong ownership mindset with accountability for project delivery.
• Ability to communicate technical concepts clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Comfortable working in a fast-paced environment with multiple projects and priorities.
• Ability to balance engineering quality with practical business and delivery requirements.
• Strong documentation and communication skills.

What We’re Looking For

We are looking for a hands-on Technical Lead rather than a purely managerial profile.

The ideal candidate should be able to:

• Understand business requirements and translate them into technical solutions.
• Design scalable and reliable application architecture.
• Guide and mentor engineering teams.
• Review critical code and technical implementations.
• Solve complex technical and production issues.
• Make effective technology and architecture decisions.
• Take ownership of delivering reliable products into production.

Mandatory Criteria

6+ years of software engineering experience with strong expertise in modern web technologies.

Strongly Preferred

• Experience building or leading FinTech products in India.
• Practical understanding of AI/GenAI technologies and their integration into modern software products.

We are looking for an Engineering Lead to own the entire technology stack — from onboarding and underwriting to disbursals, repayments, and collections — and to build the engineering function into something genuinely AI-native. 

What You'll Own 

● Full tech stack: backend, frontend, infrastructure, integrations, and data pipelines 

● Real-time underwriting and decisioning systems 

● LOS/LMS architecture — onboarding, disbursals, repayments, and collections

● Integrations with bureaus, KYC providers, account aggregators, and payment gateways 

● Reconciliation systems — disbursement, repayment, and NACH reconciliation end-to-end 

● AWS infrastructure: scaling, reliability, uptime, and cloud cost ownership ● Data infrastructure for the credit and risk team — feature pipelines, model serving, experiment infrastructure 

● Engineering leadership: hiring, sprint planning, code reviews, and execution standards 

● Compliance systems: RBI guidelines, DPDP, KYC/AML, e-NACH, e-sign 

AI-Native Engineering 

This is a core part of the role, not a bonus. You will build a machine-readable knowledge base of the entire codebase — architecture, data models, service contracts, coding standards, decision history — so that AI agents working on code have the context to produce accurate, consistent output. You will build skills for code review, developer onboarding, and recurring engineering workflows. You will build a code review pipeline where agents do the first pass on every pull request. The knowledge base and the skills improve over time as the team grows and the product evolves. 

What We're Looking For 

● 7+ years in software engineering, with at least 2 years leading teams or architecture

● Strong hands-on experience with Python, Django, and React Native

● Deep expertise in AWS and cloud-native architecture 

● Experience with both SQL and NoSQL databases 

● Strong understanding of distributed systems, microservices, and API design

● Experience owning reconciliation or payment flow infrastructure in a lending or payments context

● Prior experience in fintech / NBFC / digital lending — mandatory

● Strong understanding of the full loan lifecycle — mandatory 

● You have used LLMs seriously as engineering tools and have strong opinions about what makes AI-assisted development produce good output versus mediocre output 

Bonus: Kubernetes / Kafka, AI/ML-driven underwriting, Account Aggregator framework, e-NACH / e-Sign / Video KYC integrations 

What Success Looks Like 

● scales with strong uptime, performance, and reliability

● Reconciliation runs cleanly — no financial discrepancies surface late ● A new engineer joins and is writing standard, correct code within their first week

● The credit team is never blocked on an engineering dependency 

● Engineering health metrics are tracked and visibly improving 

● AI agents are doing the structured first pass on code reviews, and the system gets smarter over time 

Role & Responsibilities

Responsibilities

• Business: Immerse in operations until you think like an insider.

Rapidly acquire domain expertise through direct observation, translate between business and engineering seamlessly, and mentor engineers in your area on immersion. Influence senior stakeholders effectively, manage complex stakeholder landscapes with competing agendas, and build trust rapidly with new stakeholders.

• Delivery: Lead rapid delivery initiatives across teams in your area, coach on prototype-first approaches, and establish trust through consistent fast delivery. Build complete applications rapidly across any technology stack, select the right tools for each problem, and define clear criteria for prototype-to-production transitions.

• Generative AI: Architect RAG systems for complex use cases across teams, implement advanced techniques (hybrid search, reranking, query expansion), mentor engineers on RAG best practices, and establish RAG standards. Lead evaluation strategy across teams, establishing annotation guidelines, training human-calibrated LLM judges, and building evaluation pipelines that connect tracing to datasets to experiments.

• People: Build high-performing teams across your area, navigate complex interpersonal dynamics, foster psychological safety, and create environments where diverse perspectives are valued. Influence through communication at all levels — from frontline to executive. Handle difficult conversations skilfully and train engineers in your area on effective communication.

• AI-Augmented Development: Optimise AI tool usage across teams in your area, train engineers on AI-augmented and agentic engineering workflows, evaluate new AI development tools, and establish practices that balance AI speed with verification rigour.

• Scale: Design complex multi-component systems end-to-end, evaluate architectural options for large initiatives across teams, guide technical decisions for your area, and mentor engineers on architecture. Create debt reduction strategies across teams, influence roadmap decisions to include debt work, and teach engineers when to accept debt for speed versus when to invest in quality.

• Documentation: Define documentation standards across teams in your area, create documentation systems and templates, train engineers on spec-driven development, and ensure documentation quality across projects. Lead pattern generalization initiatives, defining criteria for when to generalize versus keep custom.

• Reliability: Define reliability standards across teams in your area, drive post-incident improvements systematically, design capacity planning processes, andmentor engineers on SRE practices.

Ideal Candidate

• Strong Staff Software Engineer / FDE profile (full-stack + production GenAI, multi-team technical leadership)
• Mandatory (Experience 1) – Must have 7+ years of relevant professional software engineering experience, with demonstrated full-stack delivery across backend and frontend.
• Mandatory (Experience 2) – Must have deep production experience with Python AND JavaScript/TypeScript, working comfortably across the full stack.
• Mandatory (Experience 3) – Must have 2+ years of experience in generative AI applications developement — LLM integrations, vector databases, RAG systems, and evaluation pipelines
• Mandatory (Experience 4) – Must have strong experience with modern frontend frameworks (Next.js / React) and backend API development.
• Mandatory (Experience 5) – Must have extensive experience with cloud platforms (AWS preferred; Azure/GCP valued), including infrastructure-as-code (CloudFormation / Terraform).
• Mandatory (Experience 6) – Must have working knowledge of multiple database paradigms — relational (PostgreSQL), document, and key-value (Redis) — with ability to select the right storage per problem.
• Mandatory (Experience 7) – Must have strong experience with CI/CD pipelines (e.g. GitHub Actions), containerization, and production deployment strategies.
• Mandatory (Experience 8) – Must have demonstrable fluency with AI coding tools (Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, or similar) and proven ability to design agentic engineering workflows and train teams on them
• Preferred (Experience) – Advanced RAG techniques — hybrid search, reranking, query expansion — and establishing RAG standards across teams

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.

Location: Hyderabad, India. Based at the KnackLabs headquarters, with occasional travel to client locations for workshops and reviews. This role does not involve extended onsite deployments.

About the Role

You will work as an AI Architect who designs the systems behind our client engagements: AI agents, RAG systems, automation platforms, and the conventional backend systems around them.

This is a hands-on design role, not a slideware role. You will scope architectures with clients, make the hard technical decisions, defend them in review, and stay accountable for how the systems perform in production.

You will work directly with clients. Everyone at KnackLabs does. You will sit in design discussions with client engineering teams, present architecture decisions to technical and business stakeholders, and answer for the choices you make.

A full KnackLabs engineering team in Hyderabad builds with you. You own the technical design and the quality of what ships.

What you'll own

1. Architecture - Design AI agents, RAG systems, integrations, and the scalable backend systems around them, for multiple client engagements.
2. Technical scoping - Work directly with clients to turn a business problem into a system design, with clear trade-offs and clear reasons.
3. Scale and reliability - Make sure what we build handles real load: data stores, queues, caching, horizontal scaling, and fault tolerance.
4. Design reviews - Review designs and builds across engagements. Set the technical bar and hold it.
5. Evaluation strategy - Define how we measure accuracy, safety, latency, and cost for the AI systems we ship.
6. Guiding engineers - Raise the level of the engineers building with you, through reviews and direct pairing.
7. Feedback to the platform - Feed what you learn across engagements back into our platform and internal tools.

What we are looking for

1. Around 7 or more years of software engineering experience, including direct work with customers on design or delivery.
2. Full-stack development experience with strength in backend technologies.
3. Experience designing and building scalable applications. You understand how large-scale distributed systems work: data partitioning, queues, caching, horizontal scaling, and fault tolerance.
4. At least 2 years of strong, hands-on AI experience with large language models in production.
5. You build with AI coding tools like Claude Code or Codex as your default way of working. You understand Claude Skills, have written skills yourself, use them actively, and have contributed to them.
6. Hands-on experience building retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems: chunking, embeddings, vector databases, retrieval, and reranking.
7. Hands-on experience building AI agents.
8. Strong programming skills in Python. Working knowledge of TypeScript or JavaScript.
9. Experience with at least one cloud platform (AWS, Azure, or GCP).
10. Clear communication. You can explain an architecture decision to an engineer and to a business leader, and defend it under questioning.
11. High ownership and comfort with ambiguity. You can take an unclear problem and turn it into a design.

Nice to have

1. Experience building evaluations to measure accuracy, safety, latency, and cost.
2. Experience with observability and tracing tools such as LangSmith or Braintrust.
3. Experience with on-premises or private cloud (VPC) deployments.
4. Experience deploying AI systems in regulated industries such as insurance, banking, or the public sector.
5. Experience with data engineering and pipelines.
6. A history of side projects, open source contributions, or products you shipped end-to-end.
7. Experience working at a consulting or professional services firm in a client-facing delivery role.

Stack and tools

1. Languages: Python and TypeScript.
2. Models: Claude and other frontier or open-source models, chosen to fit the customer.
3. AI patterns: RAG, agents, prompt engineering, skills, and evaluations.
4. Vector and retrieval: vector databases and retrieval pipelines.
5. Cloud: AWS, Azure, or GCP, on public or private cloud.
6. Integration: REST APIs and enterprise system connectors.

• We are looking for experienced AI/ML Architects to join our AI Engineering service line. In this role, you will anchor the technical delivery of enterprise AI/Agentic AI projects post deal-closure. You will take over from solution architects and lead the design, build, deployment, and optimization of AI/ML systems — ensuring production-grade quality, scalability, and compliance. 
• You will interface with cross-functional teams, manage engineering complexity, and ensure value realization for customers across industries such as BFSI, HLS, Manufacturing, CMT, Retail, and Energy. 

Key Responsibilities

Architecture & Technical Leadership

Hands-on Engineering & Problem Solving

Required Qualifications

Education : B.Tech/M.Tech or equivalent in Computer Science, Data Science, or a related field.

Experience

● 10+ years in software architecture or engineering with 5+ years in applied AI/ML

system delivery.

● Experience in productionizing AI/ML models and building full-stack AI applications in

enterprise settings.

● Strong Python development skills; proficiency in ML/AI frameworks (PyTorch,

TensorFlow, Scikit-learn).

● Strong understanding of LLMs, RAG pipelines, vector databases (Weaviate, Qdrant,

Pinecone).

● Experience with MLOps/LLMOps tools: MLflow, Argo, KServe, Feast, Kubeflow.

● Proficiency in data pipeline engineering using Spark, Airflow, or DataFlow.

● Exposure to agent orchestration frameworks: LangChain, LangGraph, AutoGen,

CrewAI is a big plus.

● Cloud & Infrastructure

● Hands-on experience with GCP (Vertex AI, BigQuery, Document AI, AI Gateway)

and/or Azure (Azure ML, OpenAI, Synapse).

● Expertise in containerization (Docker) and orchestration (Kubernetes).

● Familiarity with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Pulumi, CDK).

Soft Skills

Strong architectural thinking and problem-solving in fast-paced delivery environments.

Excellent communication and collaboration skills to work across cross-functional teams and

clients.

Proactive, structured, and detail-oriented with a bias for execution.

Nice to Have

Experience in real-world deployments of Agentic AI systems or collaborative multi-agent setups.

Exposure to regulatory/ethical concerns in AI such as fairness, transparency, or bias mitigation.

Familiarity with AI observability, explainability, and governance tooling (e.g., Arize, Fiddler,

TruEra).