Engineering Lead

Synth (YC S21); Bengaluru; On-site; INR 2,000,000 - 3,000,000; Full time

Job summary

Synth (YC S21) in Bengaluru is seeking a technical leader to take ownership of engineering tasks, including architecture, code review, and mentoring engineers. This position emphasizes scaling the engineering team while maintaining speed and innovation.

The ideal candidate has 5-10+ years of experience shipping production systems and deep knowledge of async and streaming systems, preferably in Python or Go. Join a dynamic startup and contribute to pioneering AI-derived solutions.

Qualifications

• 5-10+ years shipping production systems that scale.
• Strong opinions on reliability and state management in AI/LLM applications.
• Experience building AI agent systems in production.

Responsibilities

• Own the architecture and codebase.
• Design and document architecture for integrations.
• Mentor 1–2 engineers on projects.

Skills

Deep experience with async/streaming systems (Python, Go)

Technical leadership

AI/LLM application architecture

Mentoring engineers

Job description

About the Role

You take ownership of day-to-day engineering along with founders: architecture, code review, hiring, infrastructure decisions, and customer technical conversations.

IC-first role. You'll ship code, architect systems, and mentor engineers naturally. We are not hiring a manager; we are hiring the best technical leader we can find and letting leadership emerge through respect and technical excellence. You'll help scale the team of engineers without killing our speed.

What You'll Do

• Own the architecture and codebase: lead integration of FDE (customer deployment) work back into production systems
• Make onboarding new engineers straightforward (going from 6 to 12 fast)
• Design and document architecture for custom integrations and deployments
• Set standards for code quality, async patterns, and streaming system reliability
• Operate as IC first write code that others learn from
• Mentor 1–2 engineers on projects as capacity allows
• Help define technical strategy
• Technical interviews, culture fit conversations, onboarding new engineers

Must-haves

• 5-10+ years shipping production systems that scale
• Deep experience with async/streaming systems (Python, Go, or similar)
• Shipped something where you felt the constraints
• Strong opinions on AI/LLM application architecture — streaming, state management, reliability
• Experience building or operating AI agent systems in production — orchestrating LLM calls, tool use, multi-step reasoning, or conversation flows that run autonomously
• Familiarity with agent evaluation and quality infrastructure — designing eval harnesses, benchmarking pipelines, regression testing for AI behaviour, or conversation quality scoring across deployments
• Architecture maturity — thinks about trade-offs, not best practices
• Comfortable with the full stack from infrastructure to application
• Evidence of technical leadership — mentoring, architecture decisions, earning respect through code
• Voice/audio systems or telephony experience
• Experience bringing structure to codebases
• Founded or early employee at a 10–50 person startup