Director of Engineering & AI

AI Planet; Hyderabad; On-site; INR 5,000,000 - 8,000,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Meaningful equity ownership

Authority to shape architecture and工程—

Equity discussed early in process

Job summary

AI Planet is seeking a hands-on Director of Engineering to partner with the founders and own engineering from architecture to delivery and team building. You’ll shape the technical direction, hire and develop the team, and establish scalable practices to accelerate growth.

You’ll balance reliability, security, and performance while remaining hands-on, writing production code, reviewing complex changes, and guiding enterprise-focused solutions with a platform-first mindset.

Qualifications

• 10+ years in software engineering with leadership experience.
• Experience architecting, operating, and scaling production systems.
• Deep backend and distributed-systems expertise including APIs and data architecture.
• Strong cloud and container orchestration experience (AWS/Azure, Kubernetes).
• Experience delivering production AI/LLM systems or platform experience with AI apps.

Responsibilities

• Set technical direction for platform and customer solutions.
• Hands-on design and coding; review complex changes and resolve production issues.
• Hire, structure, and develop the engineering team with clear ownership.
• Establish planning, testing, CI/CD, observability, and incident response practices.
• Translate business priorities into realistic technical plans and dependable releases.
• Lead technical discussions with enterprise customers and translate requirements into reusable platform capabilities.

Skills

Engineering leadership

System architecture

Backend / distributed systems

Cloud infrastructure

AI/ML platform experience

Stakeholder communication

Tools

Python

FastAPI

Node.js

AWS

Azure

Kubernetes

ECS

PostgreSQL

Vector databases

Temporal

Prefect

Job description

Who we’re looking for

We’re looking for a hands‑on Director of Engineering to work alongside the founder/CXOs and own engineering from architecture, platform development, customer solutions, delivery, and team building.

You’ll shape the technical direction, hire and develop the team, and establish the practices needed to scale. This role suits someone who wants to help build a company, take responsibility for outcomes, and grow with the business.

We're looking for someone who wants to join as a partner with an entrepreneurial mindset in building this together.

About the role

We’re looking for a hands‑on Director of Engineering to work alongside the founder/CXOs and own engineering from architecture, platform development, customer solutions, delivery, and team building.

You’ll shape the technical direction, hire and develop the team, and establish the practices needed to scale. This role suits someone who wants to help build a company, take responsibility for outcomes, and grow with the business.

We're looking for someone who wants to join as a partner with an entrepreneurial mindset in building this together.

Who we’re looking for

An exceptional engineer who combines deep technical judgment with proven team leadership. You still write production code, review complex changes, and solve difficult problems and you know how to make the team around you more effective.

You bring two complementary strengths:

• Platform thinking: Design reusable, scalable capabilities across orchestration, integrations, deployment, observability, and data infrastructure.
• Customer solutioning: Understand enterprise workflows and constraints, turn them into practical technical solutions, and identify what should become part of the shared platform.

What you’ll own

• Architecture and scale: Set the technical direction for the platform and customer solutions, balancing reliability, security, performance, cost, and maintainability.
• Hands‑on engineering: Design and build critical components, review code, and resolve complex production issues. Expect substantial time on direct technical work.
• Team building: Hire, structure, and develop the engineering team, with clear responsibilities, high standards, and meaningful ownership.
• Engineering practices: Establish effective planning, testing, CI/CD, observability, incident response, and documentation.
• Delivery: Turn business priorities into realistic technical plans and dependable releases. Manage dependencies, technical debt, and delivery risks.
• Customer engagement: Lead technical discussions with enterprise customers and translate requirements into solutions and reusable platform capabilities.

What you bring

• 10+ years in software engineering, with demonstrated experience architecting, operating, and scaling production systems.
• Experience hiring and leading engineering teams while remaining technically hands‑on.
• Deep backend and distributed‑systems expertise, including APIs, asynchronous processing, workflow orchestration, and data architecture.
• Strong experience with cloud infrastructure, containerized deployments, relational databases, and production observability.
• Sound architectural judgment around multi‑tenancy, fault tolerance, enterprise integrations, and deployment constraints.
• Experience delivering production AI/LLM systems, or strong adjacent platform experience with evidence of building and evaluating AI applications.
• Clear communication with customers and technical and non‑technical stakeholders.
• Practical use of AI‑assisted development, with rigorous review and verification.

Our stack includes Python/FastAPI, Node.js, AWS/Azure, Kubernetes/ECS, Postgres, vector databases, and Temporal/Prefect. Experience with comparable technologies is welcome.

Experience building an engineering function, improving an existing platform’s reliability, or turning custom solutions into reusable capabilities is especially relevant.

What we offer

• Meaningful equity ownership, with terms discussed early in the process.
• Authority to shape architecture, hiring, and engineering practices, working directly with the founders.
• Real enterprise problems and an active customer base, with a direct connection between your work and customer outcomes.
• Room to grow your responsibility and impact as the company scales.

We’re looking for someone with entrepreneurial drive who values the opportunity to build, lead, and share in the company’s long‑term growth.