Lead Engineer

Company descriptionPRAAJX Private Limited is a Pune-based technology company building a consumer AI assistant that gets real things done for people. You tell it what you need, by voice or text, and it carries the task out in the background: scheduling, deliveries, calls, and more. People will use it every day, so reliability matters more than demos.

Role descriptionYou will be the first engineering hire and the technical co-owner of v1. You decide how it is built, you build the hardest parts yourself, and you set the standard for the engineers who join after you.

• Own the architecture and technical decisions for v1 of the product, from the first commit to the first thousand users
• Design the agent platform: task planning, tool calling, background execution, retries, and per-user memory
• Write production code every day. This is a hands-on role, not a management role
• Set up the foundations early: repositories, CI/CD, environments, logging, monitoring, and security basics
• Make build-versus-buy calls on APIs and managed services to keep cost per user low
• Set cost and latency guardrails for LLM and voice usage together with the founder, and track them weekly
• Take part in technical interviews and set the quality bar for the engineers we hire next
• Keep a written spec and decision log so nobody has to guess why something was built a certain way
• Push back on scope and help the founder cut v1 down to what can actually shipQualifications
• 5+ years building and shipping production software, including at least 1 year with LLM-based features running for real users (not only prototypes)
• Has been the lead or primary engineer on a product that went from zero to real users
• Strong in one backend stack (Node.js/TypeScript or Python) and comfortable across web, mobile, and infrastructure
• Hands-on with agent patterns: tool calling, structured outputs, async jobs and queues, and safe-to-retry operations
• Understands security for personal data: OAuth, token storage, encryption, and least-privilege access
• Cost-aware by habit: knows what an LLM or voice call costs and designs around it
• Can walk us through a live system, repository, or product they built and explain every major decisionNice to have:
• Realtime voice or telephony experience
• Mobile app releases on iOS and Android
• Familiarity with India's data-protection (DPDP) requirements
• Early-stage startup experience as one of the first engineersWhat we value:
• Owner mindset: treats the product as theirs, not as a ticket queue
• Serious and accountable: commits to a date and hits it, or says early that it will slip and why
• Direct: tells the founder when an idea is wrong, with reasons, instead of quietly building it
• Pragmatic: ships a working v1, then improves it with real usage
• Long-term commitment: this is a multi-year build, and we want someone who plans to stay