Tech Lead - Backend Python & AI

About JuiceLabs

Where creative engineering meets applied AI

At JuiceLabs, we're building vertical AI-native tools that unlock fresh insights and creative superpowers for our clients in advertising, ecommerce, and beyond. We're a nimble team of founders and builders obsessed with using AI to solve real-world problems in novel ways.

The Opportunity

This isn't your typical senior engineering role.

As a Senior Backend Engineer at JuiceLabs, you'll be a technical leader and hands-on builder rolled into one. You'll architect and build new products from zero to one, mentor engineers, and help define our technical cultureall while working directly with our co-founders on our most strategic initiatives.

You'll have genuine ownership: designing scalable distributed systems, establishing engineering best practices, leading technical decisions, and pushing the boundaries of what's possible with AI. You'll also guide and grow other engineers, helping them level up while shipping production code yourself.

We're looking for someone who brings both deep technical expertise and leadership maturity. If you're the kind of engineer who can architect a complex system in the morning, review code and mentor a teammate at lunch, and prototype a breakthrough AI feature in the afternoonthis role was made for you.

What You'll Do

Technical Leadership

• Architect and own critical backend systems and infrastructure decisions across our product suite
• Define engineering standards, code quality practices, and technical roadmaps
• Lead technical design reviews and help the team make sound architectural choices
• Identify technical debt, performance bottlenecks, and opportunities for improvement across the stack

Hands-On Engineering

• Build core infrastructure in Python (FastAPI, GCP/AWS, Postgres) with a focus on scalability, reliability, and developer experience
• Design and implement complex AI-powered featuresfrom insights to multimodal generation systems
• Own critical projects end-to-end: from architecture to deployment, monitoring, and continuous iteration

AI Innovation & Experimentation

• Push the envelope with GenAI: experiment with cutting-edge LLMs, agents, and multimodal models
• Build intelligent systems that go beyond simple API callsthink multi-step reasoning, tool use, and agentic workflows
• Evaluate and integrate new AI tools and frameworks as they emerge

Team Development

• Mentor engineers (2-3 people initially) through code reviews, pair programming, and technical guidance
• Help build and scale the engineering team: contribute to hiring, onboarding, and culture-building
• Foster a culture of ownership, curiosity, and technical excellence

Strategic Partnership

• Work directly with co-founders to shape product strategy and technical vision
• Bridge the gap between wild ideas and production realityhelp turn moonshots into concrete technical plans
• Represent engineering perspectives in product and business discussions

What We're Looking For

Core Technical Skills

• 6+ years of backend engineering experience, with deep expertise in Python and modern web frameworks
• Strong systems design experience: you've built and scaled distributed systems in production
• Mastery of cloud infrastructure (AWS/GCP), databases (SQL and NoSQL), caching, queuing, and observability
• Expert understanding of API design, testing strategies, CI/CD pipelines, and deployment best practices
• You write code that others want to readclean, documented, maintainable, and testable

AI & ML Experience

• Hands-on experience building with LLMs and prompt engineering
• Bonus: experience with model fine-tuning, running local models, or MLOps practices
• You stay current with the AI landscape and have opinions on what works (and what doesn't)

Leadership Qualities

• Excellent communicator who can explain complex technical concepts to both engineers and non-technical stakeholders
• Experience leading technical initiatives from concept to completion
• Comfortable making technical decisions with incomplete information and balancing trade-offs
• You know when to build for scale and when to ship an MVP

Startup DNA

• High ownership and accountabilityyou see projects through and unblock yourself
• Comfortable with ambiguity and rapid iteration; you thrive in 0-to-1 environments
• Product-minded engineer: you think about user impact and business value, not just technical elegance
• Pragmatic problem solver who balances perfectionism with shipping velocity
• Excited about wearing multiple hats and figuring things out as you go

Why JuiceLabs?

Technical Leadership Opportunity : Help shape our engineering culture and technical direction from an early stageyour influence will compound as we grow.

Impact & Influence : Work directly with founders on strategic decisions. Your ideas will shape products used by real customers.

AI at the Frontier : Build with the latest AI technology in a production environment. Experiment, learn, and push boundaries daily.

Mentorship & Growth : Help build and develop a world-class engineering team while continuing to grow your own technical and leadership skills.

Real Problems, Creative Solutions : Tackle meaningful challenges in ecommerce, consumer insights, and creative technologynot toy problems.

Ownership Culture : We value builders and leaders, not order-takers. If you want genuine autonomy and responsibility, you'll thrive here.

Competitive Compensation : Senior-level salary, meaningful equity, and benefits that reflect your experience and impact.

To Apply

We'd love to hear from you. Send your resume, GitHub profile, LinkedIn, or portfolio to

Feel free to apply directly on this job posting as well.

Experience: 6+ years

Location: Bangalore

Reports to: Cofounders