Founding Engineering Lead

Founding Engineering Lead The 30-second version WW is the AI operating system for industrial projects – tendering, estimation, procurement, vendor management, PO, GRN, and site execution on one AI-native platform. We have paying customers. Our first customer is also a strategic industry investor. We''''re well-capitalised with 3+ years of runway. AI agents already work inside our workflows today. We''''re hiring our founding engineering head, the person who will own the technical foundation of WW as it scales from working product to enterprise-grade platform. Reports directly to the CEO. The entire tech team reports to this person. Equity range: early single-digit to early double-digit percent, depending on profile and timing. If you want to build a category-defining product in a large, under-digitized industry, read on. The market we''''re going after Industrial capex projects in India alone create over ₹25 lakh crore of value every year. Even if just 1–2% of that value eventually gets digitized or intelligence-enabled, that''''s a ₹20,000–40,000 crore ($2-4 bn)annual opportunity in India, and north of $50 billion globally. And that''''s before the bigger monetization layers kick in: Vendor monetization Project financing Embedded commerce AI agents-as-a-service This is the kind of industry where the underlying market is enormous, the workflows are deeply broken (most large EPCs run projects on Excel, email, and WhatsApp), and the right product can become the operating system for an entire sector, that too without changing their behaviour. We believe WW is that product. The product vision We''''re building a deep AI agent that understands industrial projects from bidding to commissioning, one that works 24/7, is at least 10x faster and smarter than the best project manager on earth, and is impossible not to use once a team has it. Concretely: an AI coworker embedded in every team of a contractor, tendering, estimation, procurement, engineering, finance, that does 80% of the work and only pulls a human in when judgment is genuinely needed. It works when the team is asleep. It works when they''''re not in office. It picks up emails, WhatsApp messages, vendor quotes, drawings, and BOQs from wherever they already live, and turns them into structured project intelligence. That''''s the product. We''''re already on the path. The next few years are about making it real at enterprise scale. Why this role matters We''''re past the "does anyone want this" stage. Customers are paying. Market pull is visible. The investor sitting on our cap table is a customer. The next chapter is execution. We need to evolve WW from a working product into a platform that is: Reliable. Scalable. Mature. Enterprise-ready. Deeply AI-native. That requires a founding engineering leader who can hold the technical bar high, move fast, and think long-term about architecture, all at once. That''''s the role. This is not a maintenance role. It is a build role, and a leadership role. What you''''ll actually work on These are the real problems, not bullet-point abstractions. Designing agent systems that ingest unstructured tender documents (PDFs, scanned drawings, BOQs, technical specs) and produce structured cost estimates that procurement teams actually trust enough to bid on. Building a vendor-quote parsing pipeline that handles every format vendors send, PDFs, scanned images, Excel files, quotes pasted into email bodies, WhatsApp screenshots, and normalises them into comparable line items. Architecting a multi-tenant platform where one EPC''''s project data, vendor relationships, and pricing intelligence never leak across organisations, while still enabling cross-deployment AI learning in a privacy-safe way (this is our long-term moat). Building the connector layer that lets WW ingest data from email, Google Drive, OneDrive, WhatsApp, TReDS, and major ERPs (SAP, Oracle, Dynamics, Tally, Strategy ERP, etc.). The product needs to work despite people, not because of them. Deciding when to use deterministic logic vs. LLM reasoning vs. human-in-the-loop, and building the eval infrastructure to know whether you got it right. Designing for modular deployment, Company A may want only Tender + Estimation. Company B wants the full lifecycle. Company C wants on-prem. The architecture has to support all of this without forking. Hardening the platform for enterprise audits, encryption, access control, audit logs, on-prem deployability, compliance posture. Setting the engineering standards for the team, code quality, system design, reliability, AI-assisted development workflows, how we ship. A fuller view of the platform vision is in our internal WW V2 system direction doc, which you''''ll be taken through in the process. What the first 90 days look like The first 90 days are focused on getting the system enterprise-ready for our active customers. That means: Deeply understanding the current architecture, the active deployments, and where the bottlenecks are Hardening reliability, performance, observability, and security to the bar that enterprise customers (and their audits) expect Identifying the two or three architectural decisions that will matter most over the next 18 months, and making them Working closely with the founder and the team to land the next set of AI-led workflows in production with the quality bar raised After 90 days, the work expands into the deeper agent platform, the connector ecosystem, and scaling the team. But the first 90 are about earning the right to do all of that by stabilising what we already have. What we''''re looking for Someone who combines: 5+ years of relevant experience Strong backend and system-design fundamentals Real experience building scalable systems that have served meaningful production workloads Hands-on exposure to AI/LLM product development, not slides, actual shipped features High ownership, hands-on execution, and comfort going deep into code when needed Product instinct, the ability to think from the user, workflow, and business outcome side, not just from the code side Comfort with ambiguity, and the discipline to bring structure to it Strongly preferred: startup experience, or a conscious career choice toward environments with ownership and velocity over comfort and structure. Strong pluses: Building AI-powered features with real users (RAG, agents, evals, fine-tuning) Enterprise-grade systems experience (multi-tenant, audit, compliance, integrations) Experience working directly with founders Experience mentoring engineers and raising team standards The setup Team: Lean team of 5 today. You''''ll inherit the existing tech team and grow it. Reporting line: Directly to the CEO (Siddharth). The full tech team reports into you. Location: Bengaluru. We believe early-stage building is best done in the same room. Funding & runway: Well-capitalised by a strategic industry investor. Over 3 years of runway. We are not in fundraising-survival mode we''''re in build and scale mode. Compensation We want core team members who think long term and want to build wealth alongside the company. So our compensation philosophy has two pieces: Cash: roughly 50–75% of what an equivalent late-stage or large-company role would pay. Consciously below market in exchange for the equity component. Equity: early single-digit to early double-digit percent, depending on profile, stage of joining, and the conviction we build together. We''''d rather have this conversation openly than have someone discover it on offer day. If the equity-heavy structure is wrong for your life stage, that''''s completely fine, but it''''s better for both of us to know that upfront. A note on co-founder potential We''''ve described this as a role with a "potential path to technical co-founder" because we want to be upfront about what''''s possible, not because we want to dangle a title. Co-founder, for us, isn''''t a milestone you unlock through tenure or performance reviews. It''''s what happens when someone develops genuine belief in this market, this problem, and this team, and when we develop the same belief in them. If that mutual conviction emerges as we build together over the coming months, we are completely open to that conversation and that level of partnership. If it doesn''''t, this is still a role with real ownership, real equity, and a foundational seat in the company. About the founder Siddharth Kothari is a second-time founder. His previous startup was built and sold at a profitable exit. He also comes from a family business in the industrial sector with 6 years of hands-on ground experience in the industry, which is why WW has the kind of customer access, problem understanding, and market conviction that''''s hard to manufacture from the outside. Roughly 11 years of startup experience overall. Long-term conviction on this space. The kind of founder who has seen the customer''''s office floor, not just their boardroom. Why someone should join To put it plainly: The market is enormous and real, ₹25+ lakh crore of annual industrial capex in India alone, $50B+ globally for the digitization layer. Customer demand is already validated, paying customers, strategic investor from the industry. The problem is deep and meaningful, this industry has been waiting for someone to build a real operating system on top of it. The product vision is ambitious, a 24/7 AI coworker that does 80% of the work for every team in a project. The upside is real ownership, early single to early double-digit equity, with a credible path to a major outcome. The team is small and the work is foundational, what you build in the first year shapes the next decade. If you want to build a globally relevant vertical software company from the ground up, this is the seat.