Engineering Leader

Role - Engineering leader (Backend)

Experience - 8-12 years in engineering roles building consumer-facing or retailer-facing products. At least 3-5 years leading lean, high-impact teams.

Location - Bangalore (5 days work from office)

ABOUT THE ROLE

The Engineering Leader - is a senior engineering leadership role with end-to-end ownership of consumer and retailer-facing technology. You will work closely with founders, business leaders, and strategic partners to envision and build the future of Indian retail.

Before applying, reflect honestly:

When was the last time you visited a customer (by your will and not as an organizational process) and changed the product direction with your insights?

When was the last time you were excited about a new technology, built conviction on it, and drove its adoption/change management across your organization?

When was the last time you were the SME your team turned to in a P0 situation?

When was the last time you rallied your business team around a technology vision to achieve a broader outcome?

If your answers to these questions feel like they belong to a distant past, we respect the strengths and experience you bring but this role may not be the right fit for where you are today, or for what this role demands. Otherwise, you will find us home :)

Key Responsibilities:

Understand the Customer, Envision and Build the future of Indian retail

You will be responsible for understanding the customer and their pain points by going on the ground every week and living their life.

Think from first principles about how technology can transform consumer experience, entrepreneur experience, and store profitability by better planogramming, product visibility and merchandising, in-store operations, and supply chain efficiency.

Own the end-to-end product engineering lifecycle, from discovery and ideation through design, development, release, and iteration, across all product surfaces.

GoldenEye Retail Operating System - POS, inventory management, store operations, and in-store consumer technologies.

Replenishment and merchandising intelligence - automated store replenishment systems, data driven product selection, and planogram optimization.

Consumer-facing applications and in store applications powered by secondary screens and TV.

Greencard loyalty program and payment solutions consumer retention, rewards, and payment integrations.

Marketing platforms and devices in-store marketing technology, digital signage, and campaign management systems for the network.

F&V (Fruits & Vegetables) supply chain systems freshness-critical supply chain technology, demand forecasting, and replenishment for perishable categories.

Build AI-first, data-driven products and intelligent systems

Simple mantra: AI will do everything and humans will intervene when required.

Reimagine every activity done in the store through data-driven, AI-first products. Conceive, create and standardize the way agentic systems are built.

This includes building AI-powered systems that automate routine decisions such as ordering, pricing, and assortment management, reducing cognitive load on store owners.

Own the data systems that are the backbone and the intelligence layer that powers product

decisions across the ecosystem.

Drive a culture of experimentation, instrumentation and fearless adoption of technology and the audacity to attempt industry-first ways of building products.

Drive engineering excellence with speed and quality

Adopt agentic coding and reimagine the way products are built with new age technology.

Build and operate a product engineering culture where engineers think in terms of user outcomes, business impact, and iteration speed not just code quality.

Establish engineering practices across the stack Java microservices, Kotlin based mobile apps, React/React-native UI products that enable rapid iteration without accumulating unmanageable technical debt.

Define and track product-engineering metrics that matter feature velocity, adoption, reliability, and direct business impact on store performance and consumer engagement.

Build strong engineering teams driven by passion for impact

Be the leader who leads from the front, living by core values and raising the bar each day.

Build, mentor, and scale a lean, high-impact team (1015 engineers) across backend, mobile, frontend, and data engineering.

Develop leaders who can independently own critical products and decisions.

Create a culture of accountability, user empathy, learning, and operational excellence.

Own the engineering roadmap, sequencing initiatives based on business priorities, partnership

commitments, technical debt, and user impact.

Be a thought partner to business leaders, not just an execution partner

Work closely with business leaders, founders, and operations teams to deeply understand their goals, challenges, and ground realities and work backwards from these to define what technology should solve.

Own business metrics alongside engineering metrics. You are accountable for store productivity, consumer engagement, supply chain efficiency, and revenue outcomes - not just uptime, velocity, and code quality.

Proactively identify opportunities where technology can unlock business value that business teams may not yet see. This requires going on the ground, talking to store owners, observing consumers, and bringing insights back into the product roadmap.

Participate in business reviews, strategy discussions, and goal-setting as an equal partner - not as the team that receives requirements, but as the team that co-creates the path forward.

Envision the future of retail technology and scale goodness to millions of kiranas

Stay deeply curious about emerging technology, AI, agentic systems, computer vision, edge

computing, and whatever comes next and constantly evaluate how these can be brought to kiranas and consumers.

Everything you build for must be designed with scale in mind. The question is always: how does this work for 100 stores, 10,000 stores, and a million stores?

Innovate retail solutions that can travel beyond, the retail media platform, the GoldenEye operating system, the replenishment intelligence, the data products and make them available to the broader ecosystem.

Own the vision of taking proven technology playbook and scaling it to transform mass market retail across India.

Qualifications, Skills, and Experience

Bachelor's or Master's in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field.

8-12 years in engineering roles building consumer-facing or retailer-facing products. At least 3-5 years leading lean, high-impact teams.

Startup or high-growth company experience is strongly preferred. Retail tech, consumer tech, or kirana/SME platforms are a strong plus.

Strong experience across Java microservices, mobile apps (Kotlin/React-Native), React web products, and data systems (ClickHouse, Databricks).

Hands-on leader who still does architecture decisions, code reviews, debugging, and prototyping.

Track record of owning business outcomes alongside engineering outcomes.

Experience co-creating technology with global partners, specifically East Asian technology companies, across cultures and time zones.

Who you are

Technologist at heart. Still gets excited about new technology, still writes code, still debugs production issues, just for the fun of doing it.

No-ego, high-ownership. Titles do not matter inside the team.

Goes to the ground. Spends time with the customers and lets those experiences drive product and engineering decisions.

Comfortable with ambiguity. The playbook does not exist yet. You will write it.

Has ability to work with juniors engineers and senior engineers equally and can operate with less/no hierarchy