Founding Staff Engineer

<h3>Accountabilities:</h3><li>
<strong>End-to-End Product Engineering:</strong>Own the design, development, deployment, and ongoing improvement of the entire consumer product, from database architecture and backend services to frontend interfaces and reader-facing experiences.</li><li>
<strong>Production Infrastructure and Reliability:</strong>Build and operate the production systems supporting interactive storytelling, including data models, streaming responses, background jobs, concurrency management, payment processing, credit ledgers, deployment pipelines, and observability.</li><li>
<strong>AI-Powered Storytelling:</strong>Design and improve AI-driven experiences that enable users to interact with fictional characters, influence storylines, and maintain coherent narratives across hundreds of conversational turns.</li><li>
<strong>Memory and Context Management:</strong>Develop strategies for persistent story memory, contextual retrieval, character-specific knowledge, relationship tracking, and event continuity to ensure that previous interactions meaningfully influence future story developments.</li><li>
<strong>Model Selection and Orchestration:</strong>Evaluate and integrate large language models for different tasks, optimizing model selection, orchestration, inference costs, and response latency while maintaining narrative quality.</li><li>
<strong>Evaluation Frameworks and Benchmarking:</strong>Build practical benchmarks, test cases, and evaluation systems to measure narrative consistency, character behavior, contextual accuracy, user experience, and potential failure modes.</li><li>
<strong>Experimentation and Iteration:</strong>Design experiments before investing in custom infrastructure, test competing approaches quickly, analyze real-world user behavior, and use evidence to guide product and technical decisions.</li><li>
<strong>AI Agent Integration:</strong>Use AI coding agents and development tools to accelerate implementation while maintaining control over architecture, code quality, system integrity, and long-term maintainability.</li><li>
<strong>Technical Architecture and Standards:</strong>Establish foundational engineering practices, architectural patterns, documentation, and development standards that enable future engineers to contribute effectively as the team grows.</li><li>
<strong>Data Integrity and Production Debugging:</strong>Ensure that individual story interactions and system events can be reconstructed and analyzed, making it possible to investigate failures, diagnose unexpected model behavior, and improve reliability.</li><li>
<strong>Product Quality and User Experience:</strong>Maintain high standards across performance, responsiveness, typography, interface state, reliability, and narrative immersion to deliver a polished consumer product.</li><li>
<strong>Technical Leadership:</strong>Work closely with the founders, product designer, and senior technical advisers to define priorities, challenge assumptions, make independent technical decisions, and align engineering execution with product strategy.</li><li>
<strong>Strategic Technology Decisions:</strong>Evaluate whether to build, buy, or adapt existing tools and AI systems, selecting technologies based on measurable product value, scalability, implementation speed, and cost.</li><li>
<strong>Future Team Development:</strong>Establish the technical foundation and engineering culture for future hires, with the opportunity to take on broader leadership responsibilities as the organization scales.</li><h2>Requirements:</h2><li>At least 5 years of relevant professional experience, with substantial hands-on expertise in production software engineering and the development of AI-powered applications.</li><li>Demonstrated experience building and operating production systems that use large language models (LLMs) as a core component, including diagnosing failures with real users and implementing effective solutions.</li><li>Strong backend engineering and system design capabilities, including database architecture, API design, concurrency, background processing, data integrity, and production reliability.</li><li>Experience developing and shipping consumer-facing products end to end, with an understanding of how technical decisions influence usability, engagement, retention, and overall product quality.</li><li>Strong knowledge of LLM integration, prompt and context management, memory architectures, retrieval strategies, and model orchestration.</li><li>Practical experience designing meaningful AI evaluations and benchmarks, with the ability to measure specific behaviors and failure modes rather than relying solely on generic evaluation scores.</li><li>Familiarity with AI coding agents and agent-assisted development workflows, including the ability to review generated code critically and identify architectural, security, and reliability risks.</li><li>Ability to design and execute rapid experiments, compare alternative approaches, interpret results, and make data-informed decisions before committing to complex infrastructure.</li><li>Strong understanding of production operations, including deployment, monitoring, observability, debugging, performance optimization, and system resilience.</li><li>Experience with modern web technologies, preferably TypeScript, Next.js, and PostgreSQL, along with familiarity with integrating frontier language models through APIs.</li><li>Understanding of payment systems, usage-based billing, credit accounting, streaming architectures, and asynchronous background processing is beneficial.</li><li>Strong product intuition and design sensibility, with an appreciation for the details that make consumer experiences intuitive, engaging, and enjoyable.</li><li>Ability to work independently in an early-stage environment, take ownership of ambiguous problems, and make sound decisions without relying on detailed specifications.</li><li>Excellent communication skills, including the ability to explain complex technical concepts in plain language and constructively challenge founders, advisers, and other stakeholders.</li><li>A collaborative, pragmatic mindset and willingness to balance rapid experimentation with maintainable architecture and reliable production systems.</li><li>Genuine curiosity about AI, interactive storytelling, user behavior, and the factors that encourage people to return to a product.</li><li>Interest in taking on broad technical ownership and progressing toward a Head of Engineering role as the team expands.</li><li>Experience as an early engineering hire at a startup and a strong technical education, such as from an IIT, NIT, IIIT, or BITS institution, are advantageous but not mandatory.</li><h2>Benefits:</h2><li>
<strong>Competitive salary:</strong>Annual compensation ranging from ₹50,00,000 to ₹1,00,00,000, depending on experience and suitability for the role.</li><li>
<strong>Fully remote work:</strong>Work from anywhere in India with the flexibility of a remote-first position.</li><li>
<strong>Founding-level ownership:</strong>Take responsibility for the product's engineering foundation, architecture, technology choices, and long-term technical direction.</li><li>
<strong>Direct founder collaboration:</strong>Work closely with experienced founders and a founding product designer, with access to senior technical advisers for guidance and strategic input.</li><li>
<strong>Long-term business orientation:</strong>Join a business funded by its founders' existing proceeds, with no stated dependence on external fundraising timelines.</li><li>
<strong>Significant technical autonomy:</strong>Influence the technology stack, evaluate emerging AI systems, and decide which capabilities to build internally or leverage through existing solutions.</li><li>
<strong>AI-first development environment:</strong>Access AI coding tools, computing resources, and model budgets to support meaningful experimentation and accelerate product development.</li><li>
<strong>Rapid experimentation culture:</strong>Test ideas, compare technical approaches, and iterate based on real user behavior rather than prolonged planning cycles.</li><li>
<strong>Career progression:</strong>Opportunity to grow into a Head of Engineering position as the business and engineering team expand.</li><li>
<strong>Broad professional impact:</strong>Shape a new AI-powered consumer product and establish engineering practices that future team members will inherit.</li><li>
<strong>Healthcare, paid leave, and additional perks:</strong>Specific details regarding insurance, paid time off, bonuses, and other benefits have not been disclosed in the available job description and should be confirmed during the hiring process.</li>