Technical Lead / Engineering Lead Hands-On

Company: Template.net

Location: Hyderabad, India

Employment Type: Full-Time | On-Site

About Template.net:

Template.net is an AI-native creation platform used by more than 4 million people worldwide every month.

We are building the next generation of AI-powered creation tools, where users simply describe what they need, and AI turns their ideas into finished, editable designs, videos, and documents - all in one place, from prompt to ready-to-use content in minutes.

We are a global product and technology company building scalable, high-performance AI products for users worldwide.

About the Role:

We're looking for a hands-on Technical Lead / Engineering Lead who can own engineering end-to-end from system architecture and writing production code to deployment, scaling, and production reliability.

This is not a management-only role. We're looking for a strong software engineer who enjoys coding, solving complex technical challenges, making pragmatic architectural decisions, and building high-performing engineering teams.

You'll work closely with Product to build, launch, and scale AI-powered applications used by millions of people worldwide.

What You'll Do:

- Own end-to-end engineering: Lead system architecture, technical design, development, deployment, scaling, and production operations.

- Stay hands-on with coding: Actively write, review, debug, and ship production code while guiding the engineering team.

- Design scalable systems: Build reliable, high-performance applications using modern backend architectures, databases, APIs, caching, queues, and asynchronous processing.

- Build AI-powered products: Integrate LLMs, generative AI models, APIs, and image, video, and audio generation workflows.

- Optimize AI infrastructure: Improve inference latency, processing performance, model integration reliability, and API costs.

- Own production reliability: Drive CI/CD, cloud infrastructure, monitoring, security, performance optimization, and incident resolution.

- Accelerate engineering delivery: Leverage AI-assisted coding tools, automation, and modern development practices to ship high-quality software faster.

- Build and mentor the team: Hire, develop, and lead engineers while establishing strong engineering standards and a culture of ownership.

- Ship products quickly: Collaborate closely with Product to turn ideas into working software, launch features rapidly, and continuously improve them.

What We're Looking For:

- 8+ years of software engineering experience, with proven hands-on coding skills and technical leadership.

- Engineer first, leader second: Someone who enjoys writing code, solving complex technical problems, and leading by example - not just managing people.

- Strong backend or full-stack expertise in Node.js, TypeScript, React, SQL, or comparable technologies.

- Deep understanding of system architecture, distributed systems, databases, APIs, cloud infrastructure, and scalable application design.

- End-to-end product engineering experience: Proven ability to independently design, build, deploy, scale, and troubleshoot production applications.

- Practical AI/GenAI experience: Experience integrating LLM APIs and building AI-powered applications. Exposure to image, video, or audio generation is an advantage.

- Strong production engineering skills in performance optimization, security, testing, CI/CD, monitoring, and reliability.

- Experience leading and mentoring engineers, conducting code reviews, making architectural decisions, and building high-performing teams.

- AI-first development mindset: Comfortable using AI coding tools, automation, and modern engineering workflows to accelerate development.

- Strong ownership and product thinking: Able to make pragmatic technical decisions, move quickly, avoid unnecessary complexity, and deliver reliable products that create real customer value.

Why Join Template.net?

- Build cutting-edge AI products used by millions of people worldwide.

- Work on challenging engineering problems across generative AI, image, video, documents, and design.

- Take real ownership of technical architecture, engineering decisions, and product delivery.

- Build and lead a talented engineering team while continuing to write production code.

- Work in a fast-moving, product-focused environment where your contributions have a direct impact.

We're looking for a builder who leads by example someone who can take a problem, design the solution, write the code, ship it to production, and help the team do the same.