Senior AI Engineer / Technical Lead (India Based)

We are a founder-led startup developing a private enterprise AI platform. We are looking for a technically strong, hands-on engineer who can improve an existing system, lead a small engineering team and help us take the product substantially further. This role combines production engineering, applied AI innovation and technical leadership. You must be comfortable writing code, reviewing others’ work and taking responsibility for delivery. Product functionality, target market and detailed architecture will be shared with shortlisted candidates under confidentiality arrangements. The opportunity Our platform is under active development. We need someone who can understand the existing codebase, identify what should be retained or improved, and turn ambitious product objectives into reliable software. Beyond resolving immediate engineering challenges, we want someone who can recognise emerging AI capabilities and propose meaningful advances in what the platform can achieve. You should bring original thinking, technical depth and the ability to demonstrate ideas through working implementations. What you will do Assess the existing architecture, distinguish structural weaknesses from isolated defects and recommend prioritised improvements. Design and implement reliable AI orchestration, tool execution and multi-step workflows. Establish appropriate state management, validation, retries, recovery and execution boundaries. Decide where LLM reasoning adds value and where deterministic code is required. Build repeatable evaluations and trace failures across models, prompts, application code and integrations. Translate business objectives into technical plans, clear acceptance criteria and achievable delivery commitments. Write production code, review pull requests and help colleagues resolve difficult engineering problems. Take responsibility for release quality, observability, deployment practices and operational documentation. Explain technical options, risks and trade-offs clearly to the founder. Innovation and advanced AI capability We want someone who can help move the platform beyond conventional chat interfaces and basic agent demonstrations. You should be able to evaluate and apply advances in areas such as: Agents that plan, execute, verify results and recover from failure across longer tasks. Persistent context, memory and retrieval that improve relevance while preserving information boundaries. Coordinated agents and tools, with clear responsibilities and controlled execution. Proactive assistance and background workflows, with appropriate permissions and human oversight. Model selection and routing to improve quality, latency and cost. Interfaces that allow users to understand, direct and intervene in AI-driven work. You will be expected to propose improvements tied to user needs, build focused experiments, measure their results and recommend what should enter production. We value the judgement to distinguish useful advances from impressive demonstrations that do not hold up in practice. Required qualifications and experience A recognised university degree in Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Computer Science or a closely related technical discipline. If your degree is in a broader discipline, substantive formal study or postgraduate qualifications in AI or machine learning. At least five years of professional software engineering experience, including responsibility for production systems. Demonstrable experience building and maintaining LLM-based applications used by real users. Strong backend engineering skills and practical knowledge of APIs, databases, cloud infrastructure and software security. Experience with tool calling, structured outputs, retrieval and agent orchestration. Experience leading or mentoring engineers while remaining a substantial individual contributor. Ability to read technical papers or documentation critically and translate relevant ideas into practical implementations. Short courses, prompt-engineering certificates or experience using coding assistants alone do not meet these requirements. How we expect you to lead For a small team, technical leadership means contributing directly while taking responsibility for the wider engineering outcome. You should review implementation details, challenge weak assumptions, identify problems early and help colleagues succeed. When requirements are unclear, we expect you to ask specific questions and resolve ambiguity. When an approach is failing, we expect you to propose and implement a better route. We value clear communication, constructive disagreement and evidence-based decisions. Working arrangement Long-term freelance engagement requiring full-time availability. Meaningful working-hours overlap with the UK. Please disclose other ongoing professional commitments. An initial paid, scoped technical assessment and practical contribution, followed by a longer engagement if there is a strong fit. Confidentiality arrangements before access to sensitive product information or code. Please include the following in your application Your relevant degree and AI qualifications, including institutions and subjects studied. Two production AI systems you helped build: your personal contribution, how they were used and what you maintained after launch. One example of diagnosing and fixing an unreliable AI workflow. Explain how you identified the cause and verified the improvement. One example of an innovative AI capability you proposed and implemented. What measurable benefit did it create? How you would approach your first two weeks joining an existing platform and engineering team. Relevant code samples, technical writing or work you can demonstrate confidentially. Your earliest start date, weekly availability, UK-hours overlap, other commitments and expected rate. Please provide specific examples and distinguish your own work from the wider team’s contribution. Applications without the required qualifications or relevant production experience will not be shortlisted.