Founding Engineer Lead

Read This Before Anything Else

We have 6 developers who can ship. What we don't have is someone who turns that into a real engineering function: real architecture, real leverage, real AI-driven advantage. If that gap sounds like an opportunity rather than a headache, you're in the right place. If it sounds like a lot of undefined work with no playbook handed to you, this one probably isn't for you. That's completely okay. There are plenty of great roles that fit differently.

About CraftMyPlate

CraftMyPlate is Hyderabad's go-to platform for food experiences for micro-events: house parties, birthdays, office celebrations, festive gatherings, and more. We're building the operating system for how India discovers, customises, and orders food for smaller events. We're backed by established founders and investors, and we're funded and growing fast. The next phase of that growth runs through engineering.

Where We Stand

Some numbers, because they matter more than adjectives. Order volume has grown 50x in two years, and we're compounding at roughly 3x year over year, without giving up equity to fund it. That means the business runs on its own economics. The growth is real demand, not runway bought with dilution, and every efficient architectural decision this role makes directly protects that.

Most people size up an opportunity by asking what's going to change in ten years. The more useful question, and the one this company is built around, is what won't change. People will keep gathering. They'll keep celebrating, hosting, and marking festivals, in 10 years and in 20. That permanence is the bet. You're not building infrastructure for a trend cycle. You're building for a category that outlasts the current AI wave, the next funding round, and probably us too.

The Technical Reality

Here's an honest read of the engineering problem, not a sanitized version of it.

Event-driven commerce doesn't scale like typical e-commerce. Demand isn't smooth, it's spiky: weekends, festival calendars, and event dates create real load concentration, and each order is tied to a hard deadline that can't slip the way a shipped package can. That has direct architectural consequences: systems need to handle bursty, unpredictable traffic without paying for idle capacity the rest of the time, which is exactly why we're serverless-first on AWS rather than running a fixed fleet sized for peak.

Underneath that, every order touches multiple systems that have to stay consistent: kitchen and vendor fulfillment status, inventory across partners, payment gateway settlement, and refunds, often in real time and often across more than one vendor for a single event. Getting that consistency right across SQL and NoSQL stores, without it becoming a source of support tickets and manual reconciliation, is a real architecture problem, not a CRUD problem.

The AI-agent layer is the next lever, and it's a business lever as much as a technical one. Every workflow we can hand to a well-orchestrated agent instead of a new hire is a workflow that scales without adding headcount, which is exactly how a company grows 3x a year without diluting equity to fund the team behind it. That's why agent orchestration across multiple LLMs, using LangGraph, sits in the "go deep" tier of this role rather than being a nice-to-have.

You'll likely find some of this framing right and some of it worth challenging once you're actually in the codebase. That's expected, and honestly preferred over someone who just nods along.

Why This Role Exists

You'll be the most senior technical person in the company, reporting directly to the founder. Not a manager brought in to run standups. An owner. You set the architecture, you write code yourself, and you make the team materially better. You also own where AI and automation take this company next, starting with our first in-house AI agent product (details shared in the interview), and expanding from there into how the company runs, department by department: HR, finance, marketing, design, development, all sitting on an engineering layer that you design.

If you've outgrown a role where you plan but don't build, or where good ideas die in a committee, this is built to be the opposite of that.

What You'll Own

• Architecture, end to end. Scalable, cost-efficient systems from day one, not "fix it later" engineering. You own the decisions and their long-term consequences.
• Hands-on building. You are still writing code and shipping. This isn't a seat where you review other people's work all day. You lead by building.
• The engineering team. Directly manage, mentor, and level up our 6 developers. Build the technical bar, the review culture, and the calibration that lets the team ship independently.
• The AI-agent roadmap. Own the architecture behind our first AI agent product, then the broader strategy for AI agents and automation across every function in the company, with engineering as the layer underneath all of it.
• Team scaling. Build the next layer of leads under you so execution quality scales without you being the bottleneck.
• Technical accountability. When something breaks, you fix it. You don't escalate and wait.

Our Stack, and the Depth We Expect

Not everything on this list needs the same level of mastery. Some of it you need to own at an architectural level. The rest you need to be strong enough to build yourself, direct the team on, or delegate to AI agents with confidence.

Go deep here. This is where the real architecture decisions live, and where the business impact is highest:

• AWS, serverless first. You should be genuinely well versed in AWS application development, not just "have used AWS." You should be able to design and guide serverless architecture (Lambda, API Gateway, DynamoDB, Step Functions, and similar) as our default way of building, because our demand curve is spiky by nature and fixed infrastructure is money left on the table.
• TypeScript, our primary language across backend and frontend.
• Agent orchestration across multiple LLMs, using LangGraph. This is core to our AI roadmap and our path to scaling operations without scaling headcount. You own how it's architected, not just how it's used.

Working proficiency. Build it yourself, direct the team, or hand it to an AI agent and know if the output is right.

This Is You If

• You've built and shipped real production systems yourself, not just reviewed other people's architecture from a distance.
• You go deep wherever the problem is, and you're comfortable owning the exact stack described above, not just "full-stack" in the abstract.
• You've made engineers around you measurably better, whether or not you've held the title for it yet.
• You're already using AI coding tools and agents seriously, like Claude, Cursor, or similar tools, as part of how you build, not as something you tried once. We'll likely explore this together in the interview.
• You have a bias toward leverage over hours. You'd rather automate or systematize a problem than grind through it. But when something's live and needs to be done right, you see it through completely, with no half-finished work.
• You want to build something for years, not land somewhere comfortable. We'll know the difference from how you talk about your last three years.

This Might Not Be the Right Fit If

• You'd prefer a stable, well-defined role with clear boundaries and someone else making the calls. That's a fair thing to want, just not what this is.
• You'd rather receive direction than bring us architecture and AI strategy yourself.
• You haven't yet gotten hands-on with AI coding tools in your daily work.
• You're drawn more to the title than the work behind it.

If none of that sounds like you, we'd love to hear from you.

Requirements

• 5 to 7 years of experience in software engineering, with real ownership of architecture-level decisions, not just feature delivery.
• Prior experience leading or mentoring engineers, formally or informally.
• Tier-1 or Tier-1+ engineering college strongly preferred (IIT, BITS, top NIT tier, or equivalent). We'll consider other institutions only with clearly commendable, verifiable work: real systems you can walk us through in depth, strong open-source contributions, or a track record that speaks for itself. Pedigree is a proxy for speed, not a checkbox. We test for the underlying ability regardless.
• Comfortable in an early-stage environment: undefined problems, few processes, and the expectation that you help define both.

Compensation

Competitive, with equity. We're formalizing a structured ESOP program alongside this hire. Specific numbers are discussed directly in later interview rounds.

If reading this got you a little excited about what you'd build here, we'd genuinely love to talk. If it didn't quite land, no hard feelings. We just want the right fit for both sides.

Skills

High-level design, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Multi-agent Systems, Fullstack Developer, Amazon Web Services (AWS), React.js, Mobile App Development, Microservices, Data Structures, Large Language Models (LLM) tuning, Open Source Contribution