VP of Engineering

Gnani Innovations Private Limited.; Bengaluru; On-site; INR 4,500,000 - 7,000,000; Full time

Job summary

Gnani Innovations Private Limited. in Bengaluru is looking for a VP of Engineering to lead the engineers behind its advanced voice platform. This senior role involves setting strategy, managing multiple teams, and making key architectural decisions while ensuring the platform's reliability and performance.

The ideal candidate should have over 15 years of experience in software engineering, with a strong background in cloud-native technologies and real-time systems. This position offers a unique opportunity to influence the future of enterprise voice AI.

Qualifications

• You are a sitting engineering leader at an enterprise SaaS or high-growth product company.
• You have built and scaled engineering organizations that ship demanding software in production.
• Strong cloud-native and reliability depth.

Responsibilities

• Set engineering strategy and scale a multi-team organization.
• Own the architecture, latency, and reliability decisions.
• Manage delivery and ensure customer implementations.

Skills

Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)

WebRTC

Backend Python

ASR

Go (Programming Language)

VAD

Text-to-Speech (TTS)

AI / LLM

Education

15+ years in software engineering

Job description

Gnani.ai is a frontier Voice AI company, building best‑in‑class AI models and agentic AI platforms that solve problems at scale. Our proprietary stack — speech recognition, text‑to‑speech, small language models, and agentic voice platforms across 40+ languages — powers real‑time conversations in production for some of the most demanding enterprises in the world.

We own our stack end to end. That is our moat — and product is how we turn that depth into experiences customers and developers love.

The Role

We are hiring a VP of Engineering to lead the organization that builds and runs our voice platform — the real‑time runtime, the product surfaces on top of it, and the cloud and telephony infrastructure that keep it fast and reliable under enterprise load. This is a senior, deeply technical leadership role reporting to the Chief Product & Engineering Officer.

You will set engineering strategy, scale a multi‑team organization, and stay close enough to the system to own the hard calls on architecture, latency, and reliability yourself. Our AI research organization owns the models; a separate Delivery organization owns customer implementations. Your mandate is to make the platform something both of them can build on with total confidence.

What You’ll Own

• The real‑time voice platform & runtime — the orchestration layer where telephony, speech, and agentic logic meet, engineered for low latency and high concurrency.
• Product engineering — the teams building our agentic voice platform, our voice and speech products, and a growing speech‑analytics product.
• Infrastructure, DevOps & telephony — Kubernetes‑based cloud infrastructure, the VoIP/telephony stack, observability, release engineering, and security operations.
• Reliability & scale — SLAs, on‑call, incident response, capacity and concurrency provisioning, and cost‑efficient operation at the platform layer.
• Quality & test engineering — test strategy, test automation, and release quality across the product pods, with QA embedded close to the teams it serves.
• The engineering organization — hiring, structure, manager development, the technical bar, and engineering culture, partnering with a Principal Architect who holds cross‑product technical authority.

What We’re Looking For

You are a sitting engineering leader at an enterprise SaaS or high‑growth product company, and you have built and scaled engineering organizations that ship demanding software in production.

Core — what matters most

• 15+ years in software engineering, with several years leading at Director / Sr. Director / VP level at a product company.
• Has personally architected and scaled distributed, low‑latency or real‑time systems in production — and can still go deep with the strongest engineers.
• A track record of scaling an engineering org through growth: hiring senior talent, managing managers and technical leaders, and raising the bar without slowing delivery.
• Strong cloud‑native and reliability depth — Kubernetes, observability, on‑call/incident discipline, capacity and cost management at scale.
• Enterprise‑grade instincts — multi‑tenancy, security, and operating under real customer SLAs and compliance obligations.
• Partners cleanly with peer AI and Product leaders, keeping ownership boundaries crisp.

Strong advantage — what sets a candidate apart

• Building or operating GenAI / agentic‑AI platforms comparable to ours.
• Real‑time communications, streaming, media, or voice — SIP/RTP, telephony, VAD, ASR/TTS orchestration.
• Running LLM / agentic systems in production.
• Familiarity with the Indian enterprise market and its regulatory environment (DPDP, RBI, IRDAI, TRAI, and HIPAA‑type regimes).
• Exposure to multilingual / Indic products.

A note on the bar: deep voice‑AI or model‑research experience is a plus, not a prerequisite. We are looking first for an exceptional, scaled, hands‑on engineering leader.

• Hands‑on engineering — still writes and reviews production code; fluent in one or more modern backend languages (e.g. Go, Python, Rust, Java) and sets the bar by example.
• System architecture & design — strong command of design principles, patterns, and trade‑off analysis; clean service boundaries and well‑considered APIs (REST / gRPC / streaming).
• Distributed systems at scale — designing and operating low‑latency, high‑concurrency backend services.
• Event‑driven & streaming architectures — message buses and pub/sub (e.g. Kafka, NATS), async and stream processing, queueing, and backpressure.
• SQL & NoSQL databases — sound data‑modelling judgement, choosing the right store, and tuning for scale; plus caching and in‑memory stores (e.g. Redis).
• Cloud‑native engineering — Kubernetes, containers, microservices, and infrastructure‑as‑code.
• Reliability engineering — SLAs / SLOs, observability, on‑call and incident management, capacity and cost planning.
• Performance & efficiency — profiling and optimising latency and cost at the platform and serving layers.
• Enterprise‑grade software — security, multi‑tenancy, and data protection by design.
• Advantageous — real‑time media and telephony (SIP / RTP / WebRTC, VAD, ASR/TTS orchestration), and serving LLM / agentic systems in production.

Leadership & operating

• Scaling organisations — building and structuring multi‑team engineering groups through growth.
• Talent — hiring senior engineers and developing engineering managers.
• Leading leaders — has directly managed technical leadership — Architects, Engineering Managers, and QA leads — not only individual contributors.
• Technical bar & governance — setting standards, owning architecture decisions, and making the hard calls.
• Cross‑functional partnership — working cleanly with AI, Product, and Delivery leaders.
• Strategy to delivery — translating business goals into engineering roadmaps and predictable execution.

Why This Role

The platform is real, in production, and growing — this is a scaling challenge, not a greenfield bet. You will inherit a capable team and a clear mandate, with the CPEO sponsoring the function directly through your onboarding. If you want to own the engineering of a category‑defining, India‑first voice‑AI platform and build the organization that scales it, this is the seat.

Skills Required

• Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)
• WebRTC
• Backend Python
• ASR
• Go (Programming Language)
• VAD
• Text-to‑Speech (TTS)
• AI / LLM

We will review your profile and respond with next steps. If there is a mutual fit we move fast.