Site Lead Developer

Responsibilities:

• Build, lead, and retain a high-performing engineering team in India across backend, infra, and applied AI for Giga's enterprise AI support agents.
• Own delivery for key product and platform areas: real-time orchestration, integrations, tooling, and reliability for AI agents handling millions of customer interactions.
• Drive technical design and execution for low-latency, high-availability systems that power voice/chat AI agents for large B2C enterprises (e. g., ecommerce, fintech, mobility).
• Partner with founders and US leadership on roadmap, staffing, and India expansion, acting as the primary engineering point-of-contact.
• Set and enforce engineering best practices: code quality, testing, observability, incident management, and on-call processes for production AI systems.
• Collaborate with product and customer teams to translate enterprise requirements (compliance, SLAs, security) into robust technical solutions.
• Mentor and grow senior engineers into tech leads; create a culture of ownership, speed, and high bar for talent.
• Contribute hands-on to architecture and critical code paths when needed (expected 20-40% hands-on initially).
• Establish site-level rituals: hiring pipeline, performance reviews, architecture reviews, and cross-site collaboration with US teams.

Requirements:

• 13+ years of overall experience in software engineering, with at least 4-5 years in engineering management/tech leadership roles.
• Strong experience building and operating distributed, high-scale backend systems (microservices, event-driven architecture, real-time systems, or similar).
• Proven experience leading teams delivering customer-facing or mission-critical products with strict reliability/latency requirements.
• Hands-on expertise in at least one modern backend stack (e. g., Python/Go/Java) and strong system design skills.
• Prior experience in a high-growth startup or product company; comfortable with ambiguity, rapid iteration, and 01 / 110 scaling.
• Experience working with or around ML/AI products, data platforms, or real-time decisioning systems is a strong plus.
• Excellent people leadership: hiring, performance management, coaching senior ICs, and building culture across locations.
• Strong communication and stakeholder management skills, with experience working with global teams (US/Europe).
• Background in conversational AI, customer support platforms, or contact-centre technology.
• Experience setting up or scaling a new engineering site/hub.
• Prior work with enterprise customers in regulated or high-compliance domains (e-commerce, BFSI, healthcare, telecom).