Overview about Ripik.AI :

Ripik.ai is a fast-growing industrial AI SaaS start-up founded by IIT D / BITS alumni with extensive experience at McKinsey, IBM, Google, and others. It is backed by marquee VC funds like Accel, Venture Highway and 25+ illustrious angels including 14 unicorn founders.

Ripik.ai builds patented full-stack software for automation of decision making on the factory floor. Today, we are deployed at more than 15 of the largest and most prestigious enterprises in India including the market leaders in steel, aluminium, cement, pharma, paints, consumer goods and others.

It is one of India's very few AI product start-ups to be a partner to GCP, Azure, and AWS. We are also the AI partner of choice for CII, ICC, and NASSCOM.

The Role :

We are looking for an Engineering Manager with a strong backend pedigree to lead a cross-functional team of backend and frontend engineers. You will own the full product engineering lifecycle - from greenfield architecture and ground-up development through to production operations at scale - for Ripik's industrial AI SaaS platform.

The platform powers real-time decision automation on factory floors across steel, cement, pharma, and paints, ingesting high-volume sensor and vision data through robust backend services and surfacing actionable insights via responsive operator dashboards. This role demands someone who can write production-grade Java, run tight Scrum ceremonies, and make sound architectural calls under startup-speed timelines.

Key Responsibilities :

Backend Architecture & Hands-on Development :

- Own the design and development of Ripik's backend platform built on Java 21+ and Spring Boot 4.x - including RESTful and gRPC APIs, microservices decomposition, event-driven pipelines, and integration layers that connect AI inference engines with factory-floor systems.

- Architect for scale, reliability, and low latency : design services that handle high-throughput streams from industrial IoT sensors and vision cameras, process them through message brokers (Kafka / RabbitMQ), and persist results across PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis, and time-series stores (TimescaleDB / InfluxDB).

- Make key technology and design decisions - Spring Security and OAuth 2.0 / JWT for multi-tenant authentication, Spring Data for repository abstractions, Spring Cloud for service discovery and configuration, and Hibernate / JPA for ORM - while keeping the codebase clean, testable, and well-documented.

- Drive API design standards (OpenAPI / Swagger), enforce contract-first development, and ensure backend services expose well-versioned, idempotent, and backward-compatible interfaces consumed by the frontend and external integrations.

- Champion production engineering : build observability into every service with structured logging (ELK / Loki), distributed tracing (OpenTelemetry / Jaeger), metrics (Prometheus / Grafana), and alerting - own SLAs and incident response for the backend stack.

Full-Stack Product Delivery :

- Lead end-to-end product builds from the ground up - translate product requirements into technical architecture, break them into epics and stories, and ship complete features spanning backend APIs, database schemas, and frontend UIs.

- Collaborate closely with frontend engineers building operator dashboards and configuration portals (React / Next.js, TypeScript) - review UI/UX implementation, ensure performant API integration, and maintain a cohesive full-stack development workflow.

- Own the CI/CD pipeline (GitHub Actions / GitLab CI, Docker, Kubernetes on AWS / Azure / GCP), automate testing (unit, integration, E2E), and enforce quality gates so that every merge to main is production-ready.

- Coordinate with the AI / Data Science teams to integrate ML model outputs (computer vision inferences, LLM responses) into the platform - designing the serving layer, result-caching strategy, and feedback loops that connect model predictions with user-facing features.

- Manage cloud infrastructure decisions across Ripik's multi-cloud deployments (AWS, Azure, GCP) and on premises installations at customer factory sites - balancing cost, compliance, and latency requirements.

Team Leadership & Scrum Management :

- Lead, mentor, and grow a cross-functional team of backend and frontend engineers - set clear expectations, conduct regular 1:1s, drive career development, and foster a culture of ownership and technical excellence.

- Run Scrum ceremonies end to end - sprint planning, daily stand-ups, backlog grooming, sprint reviews, and retrospectives - ensuring the team delivers predictably while staying agile enough to respond to shifting priorities in a fast-moving start-up.

- Conduct thorough code reviews and architecture reviews; enforce engineering best practices around testing (JUnit, Mockito, Testcontainers), code quality (SonarQube), and secure coding standards.

- Hire and onboard strong engineers; raise the technical bar continuously through pairing, tech talks, design-document culture, and a bias toward building reusable, well-abstracted components.

- Act as the primary engineering interface with Product, Design, AI, Field Engineering, and Customer Success - translating business needs into well-scoped engineering work and communicating trade-offs, timelines, and risks transparently to leadership.

Required Skills & Experience :

- B.Tech / M.Tech in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related discipline.

- 6- 10 years of total software engineering experience with a strong backend focus, of which at least 2 years in a Tech Lead, Engineering Lead, or Engineering Manager role.

- Deep hands-on expertise in Java (17+) and the Spring ecosystem - Spring Boot (3.x / 4.x), Spring Security, Spring Data, Spring Cloud, Spring WebFlux (reactive). Ability to write production-grade code, not just review it.

- Strong experience designing and building microservices architectures, RESTful APIs, event-driven systems (Kafka / RabbitMQ), and database layers (PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis).

- Proven track record of building applications from the ground up - greenfield product development in a SaaS or product-company context, taking features from whiteboard to production.

- Experience leading and managing teams of both backend and frontend engineers - comfortable reviewing React / TypeScript code, guiding frontend architecture decisions, and maintaining full-stack delivery velocity.

- Hands-on experience running Scrum / Agile processes - sprint planning, backlog management, velocity tracking, and retrospectives - with a practical, outcome-driven approach (not ceremony for ceremony's sake).

- Strong DevOps and deployment experience - Docker, Kubernetes, CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions / GitLab CI / Jenkins), and at least one major cloud platform (AWS preferred; Azure / GCP also valued).

- Solid understanding of system design fundamentals - caching strategies, load balancing, rate limiting, database indexing, horizontal scaling, and high-availability patterns.

- Experience in a high-growth start-up or similarly fast-paced environment where shipping speed, scrappiness, and wearing multiple hats are the norm.

- Excellent communication skills - able to articulate technical trade-offs to product and business stakeholders, write clear RFCs and design documents, and present to leadership.

Good to Have :

- Experience with industrial IoT, manufacturing systems, or integration with factory-floor protocols (OPC-UA, MQTT, Modbus) and SCADA / PLC systems.

- Familiarity with Python for scripting, data pipelines, or lightweight services - useful for collaborating with the AI / Data Science team.

- Exposure to AI / ML serving infrastructure - model APIs, feature stores, inference caching - and an understanding of how backend systems integrate with computer vision or LLM pipelines.

- Experience with multi-tenant SaaS architecture, tenant isolation, role-based access control, and enterprise security compliance (SOC 2, ISO 27001).

- Knowledge of Java 21+ virtual threads (Project Loom) and reactive programming (Spring WebFlux, Project Reactor) for high-concurrency workloads.

- Familiarity with Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform, Pulumi) and GitOps workflows for managing multi-cloud and on-premises deployments.

- Experience with performance engineering - JVM tuning, garbage collection profiling, load testing (JMeter, k6, Gatling), and database query optimisation at scale.

What Can You Expect?

- Ownership of the core product platform at a high-growth, venture-backed AI start-up - directly shape architecture, team culture, and engineering processes from the ground up.

- Ability to shape the future of manufacturing by leveraging best-in-class AI and software; develop a rare skill set at the intersection of enterprise SaaS and industrial automation.

- World-class work culture, coaching, and development.

- Mentoring from highly experienced leadership from world-class companies (refer to Ripik.AI website for details).

- International exposure.