Engineering Lead

"About the job *Engineering Lead * Location: Pune (Work from Office) Experience: 6 to 8 Years (Exceptional 5+ years candidates will also be considered) Build the Future of AI for the Trades Industry At ZenTrades, we're reimagining how trade businesses operate. Our mission is to transform an industry that has long been underserved by technology through an AI-first platform that simplifies operations, improves efficiency, and helps businesses grow. From field operations and customer management to workflow automation and intelligent decision-making, we're building a modern B2B SaaS CRM platform designed for the future. We're still early in our journey, which means every engineer has the opportunity to make a visible impact. Decisions are made quickly, ideas are heard, and ownership is real. We're now looking for an Engineering Lead who wants to build, lead, and scale alongside us. This isn't a role where you'll inherit a mature engineering organization with layers of management. This is an opportunity to shape the product, influence technical direction, mentor engineers, and build the engineering culture from the ground up. If you enjoy solving difficult problems, writing production-grade code, working directly with founders, and building products that customers genuinely love, we'd love to talk. What You'll Be Responsible For As our Engineering Lead, you'll wear multiple hats. You'll be a builder, mentor, architect, and technical leader. You'll: Lead the design and development of our core B2B SaaS platform. Write high-quality, production-ready code and contribute hands-on to feature development. Design scalable, reliable, and maintainable system architecture. Drive technical decisions and establish engineering best practices. Review code and maintain high engineering standards across the team. Mentor engineers through coaching, technical guidance, and regular feedback. Work closely with Product, Design, Customer Success, and the Founder to translate business problems into elegant technical solutions. Build and scale engineering processes that enable fast, high-quality product delivery. Introduce AI capabilities and intelligent automation into our platform. Improve platform performance, security, reliability, and scalability. Participate in hiring and help build a world-class engineering team. Take ownership of production systems and ensure a great customer experience. What We're Looking For We're looking for someone who enjoys building in fast-moving startup environments and is excited by ownership. You should have: 6 to 8 years of software engineering experience (5+ years for exceptional candidates). Strong expertise in the MERN stack (MongoDB, Express.js, React, Node.js). Experience designing scalable backend systems and distributed architectures. Strong understanding of REST APIs, databases, authentication, and cloud infrastructure. Experience deploying and managing applications on AWS. Excellent knowledge of software engineering best practices, testing, code reviews, and CI/CD. Experience leading or mentoring engineering teams. The ability to balance speed with engineering quality. Strong problem-solving skills and sound technical judgment. Excellent communication and collaboration skills. Bonus Points If You Have Experience working at an early-stage startup. Been a Founding Engineer, Founding Team member, or Technical Co-founder. Built products from scratch and scaled them. Experience integrating Large Language Models (LLMs) and AI capabilities into production applications. Worked with OpenAI, Anthropic, vector databases, RAG architectures, or AI agents. Experience with Docker, Redis, Microservices, GraphQL, or TypeScript. Built customer-facing B2B SaaS products. Who Will Thrive Here You'll enjoy this role if you: Love building products from zero to one. Like solving complex technical challenges. Prefer ownership over hierarchy. Are comfortable making decisions with incomplete information. Enjoy mentoring engineers while staying deeply hands-on. Care about customers as much as clean architecture. Can move quickly without compromising quality. Want to help shape engineering culture instead of simply fitting into one. What Success Looks Like In Your First 30 Days Understand the product, customers, and architecture. Start contributing production code. Build relationships across the team. Identify quick wins and improvement opportunities. Within 60 Days Lead feature development independently. Drive architectural improvements. Mentor engineers through code reviews and technical discussions. Improve engineering quality and delivery practices. Within 90 Days Own major technical initiatives. Partner closely with the founder on product and engineering strategy. Lead sprint planning and technical execution. Help hire and onboard future engineers. Become a key technical leader within the organization. Why Join ZenTrades? Because this isn't just another engineering role. You'll have the opportunity to: Build products that solve real business problems. Work directly with the founder and influence company direction. Own meaningful technical decisions instead of simply implementing requirements. Build AI-powered products from an early stage. Help define engineering culture and technical standards. Mentor and grow a talented engineering team. See the direct impact of your work on customers and the business. Grow into a senior engineering leadership role as the company scales. If you're looking for ownership, impact, and the opportunity to build something meaningful with a passionate team, we'd love to meet you."

Required Skills ['Leadership', 'Backend Development', 'MERN Stack', 'MongoDB', 'Express.js', 'Node.js', 'React Native']

Additional Information

NA