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About the job

1. Role: Lead Engineering and AI innovation at Richpanel, an AI-first customer service platform. Our vision is to help businesses handle their customer support with just one person - even when it traditionally required 100+ support agents
2. Reports to: CEO
3. Stage: Team of 20 people. Multi-million ARR business with 100% year-over-year growth. Backed by Sequoia Capital and already profitable
4. Compensation:
1. Base: INR 60-80L per annum
2. Performance Bonus: 15-20% of base
3. Equity: 1-2% with additional milestone-based grants
5. Team: Lead 10+ engineers initially, scaling to 20+ in 12 months
6. Location: Bangalore, India (in-office)
7. Why now: We're at an inflection point - proven product-market fit, strong growth, and want to leverage AI/LLMs to 10x our capabilities and transform our industry

About Richpanel : Richpanel is building a future where small businesses can outperform large corporations. Through our platform, business owners can deploy a fleet of AI employees that manage customer inquiries with accuracy and empathy—scaling infinitely to meet demand.

We're developing autonomous AI agents to replace traditional BPO support agents, allowing brands to respond to customers instantly with accurate, up-to-date information 24/7. We have 2,000+ brands using our platform daily and are backed by Sequoia Capital, one of the world's most prominent venture capital firms.

We're seeking an exceptional engineering leader who combines deep AI/LLM expertise with proven ability to build high-performance engineering cultures. You'll be responsible for transforming our engineering organization while spearheading our AI-first approach to product development.

Requirements

You'd be a fit if...

1. Technical Expertise: Deep experience in building production-grade AI/LLM applications
2. Leadership Experience: 6+ years in engineering with 2+ years leading teams of 10+
3. Culture Builder: Track record of transforming engineering teams into high-performance organizations
4. Startup DNA: Experience scaling engineering in resource-conscious environments
5. AI Vision: Strong perspective on practical applications of AI/LLMs in B2B SaaS
6. Performance Focus: History of implementing metrics-driven engineering cultures
7. Ownership: You take complete responsibility for outcomes and build the same mindset in others

Context About Our Stage And Situation

1. Currently at 10 engineers with strong technical foundation but needing leadership to scale
2. Moving towards AI-first architecture to revolutionize our product capabilities
3. Need to maintain rapid development velocity while improving engineering processes
4. Building for scale: Both team and technical infrastructure need to support 3-6x growth
   
   

Looking for the following traits

1. Technical & AI Excellence: Deep understanding of both traditional engineering and AI/ML systems
2. People Leadership: Ability to attract, retain, and develop world-class talent
3. Culture Champion: Track record of building ownership-driven engineering cultures
4. Business Acumen: Experience aligning technical decisions with business outcomes
5. Innovation Mindset: Constantly exploring ways to leverage new technologies
6. Process Builder: Skill in implementing engineering best practices that scale
   
   

Responsibilities

1. Technical Leadership
• Drive technical vision and architecture roadmap
• Lead AI/LLM integration across product
• Ensure scalability and reliability of systems
• Establish engineering best practices
2. People & Culture
• Transform engineering culture to high-performance
• Build and scale engineering team
• Implement clear career growth frameworks
• Drive accountability and ownership
3. AI Innovation
• Spearhead AI-first architecture
• Build AI/ML capabilities in team
• Drive 10x productivity through AI tooling
• Establish AI governance framework

About us

We started Richpanel to help businesses build experiences that require zero (or almost zero) customer service. This does not mean being unavailable for your customers. But it means that you should be so obsessed with your customers, that you study their experience, every edge case, and build for it. If you think about it you only contact customer service when something breaks or you have an edge case that the app is not equipped to handle. If everything works and does what you expect it to - you will never contact customer service.

The concept may sound far-fetched but it’s very attainable. When was the last time you contacted customer service at Facebook or at Zoom? The big tech companies have been building such experiences for years and that’s how they earn them our customer’s trust & our repeat business. This is what gives them the operating leverage. While other businesses hire thousands of agents, the big tech lets their product do most of the work.

Our product is inspired by the likes of Amazon and Uber. Uber has a dedicated team called ‘Customer Obsession Engineering’ that works exclusively to create product-led support experiences. We are on our way to create better than Amazon/Uber like experiences for all businesses, without needing engineers and without needing weeks to go live.