Founding Engineer (Backend heavy)

This role is for one of the Weekday's clients

Salary range: Rs 800000 - Rs 1200000 (ie INR 8-12 LPA)

Min Experience: 2 years

Location: Remote (India)

JobType: full-timeWe are looking for a Founding Engineer (Backend-Heavy) to take end-to-end ownership of building and scaling a high-velocity, AI-native product from the ground up. This is a hands-on, early-stage role where you will architect, build, ship, and iterate rapidly—working closely with the founder and early customers to shape both the product and the engineering culture.

This is a true founding role, not a maintenance position. You will write production code daily, lead early technical decisions, and help build a strong engineering team as the company scales.

Requirements

Key Responsibilities

• Own the full lifecycle of backend-heavy product development, including architecture, development, testing, deployment, and scaling.
• Design and build scalable, reliable systems across backend and frontend layers, with a strong focus on backend architecture.
• Ship high-impact product features at high velocity; rapid iteration is a core expectation.
• Build AI-native product workflows using LLMs, agentic frameworks, RAG pipelines, and modern AI models (application-focused, not model training).
• Collaborate closely with the founder and customers to translate real-world requirements into robust technical solutions.
• Solve complex technical problems through experimentation, strong engineering practices, and pragmatic decision-making.
• Write production-grade code while mentoring and collaborating with a small engineering team of junior developers.
• Take complete ownership of product delivery in a small, high-caliber founding team and help establish long-term technical direction.

Requirements

• 2+ years of full-time experience in early-stage startups (pre-seed or seed), building end-to-end products from scratch.
• Strong problem-solving ability, high ownership mindset, and comfort operating in fast-paced, ambiguous environments.
• Hands-on experience developing and deploying applications using:
• Backend: TypeScript, Node.js, Express, Postgres
• Frontend: React
• Infrastructure & Tools: AWS (EC2, Lambda, S3), Redis, RabbitMQ, Selenium, third-party APIs
• Deep understanding of backend system design, including microservices, scheduling, load balancing, proxies, monitoring, advanced database queries, networking, and scalability.
• Proven experience designing scalable systems; ability to reverse-engineer and improve existing architectures is a plus.
• Experience building AI-native applications using LLMs, agent frameworks, and modern developer tools (e.g., Cursor, Lovable) to maximize speed and quality.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field (graduates from 2023 or earlier).