Engineering Leader (AI)

Pepper | Mumbai, Maharashtra, India | On-site (Andheri East) | Full-time

We are building Atlas, Pepper's agentic operating system. We want an engineering leader who builds like a founder: in the code, shipping fast, and dragging the platform forward.

About Pepper

Pepper is the Agentic Organic Growth System that drives outcomes. We combine strategy, AI agents, and embedded expert operators to drive growth via SEO and AI-search for 2,500+ industry leaders, including Amazon, Google, Unilever, Atlassian, HSBC, and Instacart. Atlas is the agentic operating system that powers it all.

About the role

This is not a Head of Engineering seat. It is a build seat.

We want someone who has been a founder or a founding engineer, who knows what it takes to ship a product from nothing, and who still wants to be in the code. You will own the engineering behind Atlas: the multi-agent workflows, the platform, the AI systems, the reliability. You will lead a small, sharp team, but you will lead by shipping, not by managing.

The bar is speed with judgment. Move fast, cut what does not matter, and make the calls that keep the platform moving.

On-site at Pepper's Mumbai office in Andheri East.

What you will own

• The architecture of Atlas: agent orchestration, workflows, APIs, and core services. You design it, and you build large parts of it yourself.
• Production AI systems that pair LLMs with deterministic logic, guardrails, evaluations, and human-in-the-loop. Pilots are easy. You make them work in production.
• The calls on build versus buy, on trade-offs, and on what gets cut. Velocity depends on these being made fast and well.
• A small team of strong engineers. You hire sharp, set the bar by example, and keep the team shipping.
• The reliability, observability, and security of the platform as enterprise usage grows.

What you bring to the table

• You have built like a founder. You have founded a company or been a founding engineer, and you have shipped a product from zero. You know how a founder works because you have been one.
• You are super hands-on. You are in the code every day. You would not take this role if it pulled you out of it.
• You ship fast. You drive velocity, cut scope hard, and get things into production. You are impatient with process that does not earn its place.
• You have the depth. Years of building and scaling backend and platform systems, APIs, microservices, and workflows on cloud infrastructure, with real command of system design, scalability, and reliability.
• You know AI in production. You have built LLM-powered or workflow-driven systems, and you understand agentic orchestration and human-in-the-loop design well enough to make them reliable.
• You lead by building. You can grow a small team and set a high bar, but your leverage is the code you ship and the standard you set, not the org you manage.

Why this role matters

Atlas is the engineering core of everything Pepper does. The multi-agent workflows, the reliability, the intelligence: all of it is an engineering problem, and it is being built now.

If you build like a founder, want to stay in the code, and want to drive a platform forward fast, this is the seat.

Location: On-site, Pepper, Mumbai (Andheri East).