Deccan AI
Company:
https://www.linkedin.com/company/ai-deccan
Industries: Software Development, IT Services and IT Consulting, and Technology, Information and Media
Job details:
Engineering Manager - Deccan AI
Deccan AI is a venture-backed AI infrastructure company ($25M Series A, Prosus Ventures), headquartered in the Bay Area with an engineering hub in Hyderabad. We build the infrastructure layer for Reinforcement Learning and Agentic AI and work with frontier labs including Google DeepMind and Snowflake.
Deccan AI builds the data, evaluation, and agentic infrastructure that helps frontier labs and enterprises ship AI that actually works in production. Our Helix and EnterpriseOS platforms put humans and AI side by side to catch failures, close evaluation gaps, and run mission-critical workflows for some of the most demanding AI teams in the world.
We're looking for a Senior Engineering Manager to lead one of our core engineering pods. You'll own the delivery and technical health of a team building product and infrastructure that our customers depend on daily while staying close enough to the code to review a design doc, unblock a tricky bug, or make a build-vs-buy call with your team.
This is a player-coach role at a fast-moving startup: no large platform layer to hide behind, no multi-week approval chains. You set the bar for how your team ships, you're accountable for the outcomes, and you grow the engineers who report to you.
What we're looking for
- 8+ years of software engineering experience, including 2+ years directly managing engineers or leading a team through delivery.
- A strong individual-contributor foundation you've designed and shipped production systems yourself, not just reviewed other people's PRs.
- Experience managing in a fast-moving, ambiguous environment where priorities shift and scope isn't handed to you fully formed.
- Track record of hiring, developing, and retaining strong engineers.
- Comfort operating across the stack backend systems, data pipelines, or applied ML/AI infrastructure enough to be credible with your team and with customers.
- Excellent written and verbal communication; you can explain a technical tradeoff to an engineer and to a VP in the same afternoon.
- Bias toward action and high ownership you don't wait for a large team or perfect information to move.
What you'll do
- Own delivery for your team's roadmap: scoping, sequencing, and shipping product and infrastructure work against real customer and business deadlines.
- Manage, mentor, and grow a team of engineers hiring, career development, performance feedback, and building a culture of ownership and high craft.
- Stay technical: review architecture and design decisions, jump into code and incident response when it matters, and keep enough context to make good calls fast.
- Partner closely with product, ML, and customer-facing teams to translate ambiguous requirements into a clear technical plan.
- Build and refine the engineering processes (planning, code review, on-call, quality bars) that let the team move fast without breaking things.
- Report on progress, risks, and tradeoffs to leadership with clarity and without spin.
- Represent engineering in customer and cross-functional conversations when technical depth or judgment calls are needed.
Nice to have
- Prior experience at an early- or growth-stage startup (Series A-C scale).
- Background working with LLM infrastructure, evaluation pipelines, or agentic systems.
- Experience managing distributed or hybrid teams.
Why Deccan AI
- High-trust, high-ownership culture: capable people who move fast and hold a high bar.
- Direct exposure to frontier AI labs and enterprise customers solving genuinely hard problems.
- Real influence over how engineering scales as the company grows — you'll help define the playbook, not just inherit one.
- Competitive compensation, meaningful equity, and a seat at the table as the company scales.
Click on Apply to know more.