Description :

Role Overview :

As Engineering Manager, you are the operational and technical backbone of the engineering team. You work directly with the founder who leads overall technical vision and architecture and translate that vision into reliable, well-executed engineering.

This is a player-coach role. You will be hands-on across backend development, infrastructure, and code reviews while also managing the day-to-day of the engineering team sprint planning, delivery, hiring, and engineering culture. You are the person who ensures the team ships consistently and the founder is not the bottleneck on execution.

Key Responsibilities :

- Collaborate with the founder on system architecture contribute to key design decisions, raise tradeoffs, and own implementation of agreed architecture

- Lead backend development FastAPI application design, PostgreSQL schema design, API contracts, and integration patterns

- Own engineering execution sprint planning, task breakdown, delivery tracking, and unblocking the team

- Enforce engineering standards code review culture, CI/CD discipline, testing practices, and documentation

- Own production operations monitoring (Grafana / Sentry), alerting, incident response, and on-call processes

- Manage cloud infrastructure provisioning, cost management, scaling, and reliability

- Support the founder on technical hiring defining roles, screening candidates, and onboarding new engineers

- Drive security and compliance engineering data privacy, DPDP Act readiness, and access controls

- Collaborate with the ML / AI Engineer on integrating AI and ML outputs into the product backend

- Translate product requirements into engineering plans estimates, sequencing, and risk flagging

Required Skills :

- 6 to 9 years of software engineering experience, with at least 12 years in a team lead or engineering management role

- Strong backend depth Python / FastAPI or equivalent, PostgreSQL, REST API design

- Cloud infrastructure experience AWS (EC2, RDS, S3, MSK, ElastiCache) in a production environment

- DevOps fundamentals CI/CD, Docker, monitoring and alerting, incident management

- Experience managing or leading small engineering teams (36 engineers)

- Comfortable working closely with a technical founder you contribute to architecture without needing to own it entirely

- Track record of shipping products reliably in a startup or fast-moving environment

Preferred Skills :

- Experience with RAG pipelines, LLM APIs, or AI-powered product development

- Familiarity with event-driven architecture (Kafka or equivalent) and async pipelines

- Experience with legaltech, fintech, or compliance-sensitive product domains

- Knowledge of India-specific regulatory landscape (DPDP, IT Act)

Who you are :

- You are a strong executor you take a technical direction and drive it to completion without constant oversight

- You manage people with clarity and empathy you know how to get the best out of a small, high-ownership team

- You are a collaborator, not a lone decision-maker you work well under a strong technical leader

- You communicate proactively on blockers, risks, and team health

- You care about engineering craft quality, reliability, and maintainability matter to you