Founding Engineer

Company Description

InLustro is a pioneering education and workforce development company that integrates AI-powered learning, job simulations, and industry-aligned training into academic institutions. With their AI-native Job Simulation Engine, they equip students with real-world skills, proof-of-work portfolios, and direct industry pathways. InLustro has partnered with colleges across India, impacting thousands of students and building a robust network of organizations.

Role Description

This role is for a founding engineer who will own the technical destiny of InLustro and transition into the CTO/ Tech Lead role within 6-9 months. You will architect and build the core platform that powers simulation-driven decision systems, where real-world workflows are modeled, evaluated, and scored to determine readiness and outcomes. You will operate as the primary hands-on engineer early on, making foundational architecture and data decisions that shape the company for years, while working directly with the founders to define not just how the product is built but what it fundamentally is. The role demands deep systems thinking, strong technical taste, and comfort making irreversible trade-offs under ambiguity, especially in areas where correctness, auditability, and AI reliability matter. As the platform matures, you will assume full leadership responsibility, owning hiring, engineering standards, and the long-term evolution of InLustros technology into a defensible, category-defining platform.

Qualifications

• 7-10 years of hands-on experience building and running production software that formed the core product of a business
• Has architected backend systems where complex decision logic, state transitions, and outcome evaluation are central, not peripheral
• Experience building platforms that model real-world processes such as workflows, simulations, scoring systems, or approval engines
• Proven ability to translate ambiguous, domain-heavy problems into durable technical primitives and data models
• Deep proficiency in at least one backend language (Node.js, Python, Java, Go, or equivalent) with consistently clean, maintainable code
• Has designed APIs and data schemas intended to serve as long-term platform foundations under evolving requirements
• Has made early architectural decisions with long-term consequences and understands their irreversible impact
• Has owned systems in production end-to-end, including infrastructure, deployments, monitoring, incident response, and post-mortems
• Experience building systems where correctness, determinism, and auditability matter more than surface-level UX
• Has worked on products where outputs had to be explainable and defensible to stakeholders
• Hands-on experience integrating AI/LLM systems into production workflows with attention to reliability, cost, and evaluation
• Able to design guardrails, fallback logic, and evaluation loops around probabilistic AI systems
• Has acted as the technical authority for a product, setting direction without relying on a formal CTO title
• Demonstrates strong technical taste, knowing where precision is mandatory and where simplicity is superior
• Able to work directly with founders to define product boundaries, technical strategy, and execution priorities
• Can align technical decisions with business risk, revenue impact, and long-term platform leverage
• Willing to operate as the primary engineer in the early phase and assume full CTO responsibility within six months
• Intends to own hiring, engineering standards, and the long-term evolution of InLustros platform
• Willing and able to define InLustros core technical thesis (simulation-driven decision systems) and evolve it into a defensible long-term platform