Founding Engineering Lead — AI Systems

About Genorai

At Genorai, we build AI products that help manufacturers make better decisions, respond faster, and unlock hidden capacity.

We work alongside our customers—not as consultants, but as builders—to turn real operational problems into production AI. Our products bring together AI agents, operational data, and deep manufacturing context to help factory teams make better decisions every day.

Our leadership team brings experience from Google, Microsoft and Apigee. We're building from Coimbatore with a global ambition.

The Opportunity

We're looking for a Founding Engineering Lead — AI Systems to help build the products, architecture, team, and engineering culture that will define Genorai.

This is one of the foundational engineering roles at the company. You'll have an unusual influence over our architecture, engineering practices, hiring bar, and the products we build.

This is also a deeply hands-on role.

You'll architect systems, write code, solve difficult engineering problems, mentor engineers, and work closely with our CTO, Product team, Forward Deployed Engineers, and customers.

You'll spend as much time building as leading.

Some problems will begin on a factory floor, some in our product, and some deep inside the architecture. Your job is to make sure we solve them well—and build systems that get stronger as Genorai grows.

If you want to inherit a mature engineering organization, this probably isn't the role for you.

If you want to help build one, it might be.

What You'll Own

Build the Product and Platform

Design and build the core systems behind Genorai's AI products—from agentic applications and operational intelligence to the platform capabilities that support them.

Own important parts of the journey from architecture and implementation through production.

Architect Production AI Systems

Build AI systems that go beyond prompts and demos.

Work across models, agents, tools, retrieval, enterprise data, APIs, workflows, and application logic to create systems reliable enough for everyday business use.

Make thoughtful decisions about when to use AI—and when conventional software is the better answer.

Make AI Reliable and Measurable

AI that works most of the time isn't enough when customers depend on it to make real decisions.

Build the evaluations, testing, observability, guardrails, and feedback mechanisms required to understand how our AI behaves in production.

Continuously improve quality, reliability, latency, cost, security, and performance.

Build the Data and Context Layer

Manufacturing AI depends on understanding what is happening in the real world.

Help architect how Genorai ingests, connects, validates, and uses operational data from systems such as ERP, HRMS, MES, PLM, attendance, production planning, and factory-floor applications.

Build systems that can work with real-world enterprise data—not just perfect datasets.

Solve the Hard Problems

Stay close to the code.

Debug complex systems, investigate unexpected AI behavior, resolve architectural bottlenecks, and step into the technical problems that determine whether a product succeeds.

We want a leader who can still build.

Turn Customer Learning Into Scalable Product

Our Forward Deployed Engineers work close to customers and encounter problems that don't always have predefined answers.

Work with them to identify what should remain deployment-specific and what should become part of the Genorai product or platform.

The goal isn't to solve the same problem repeatedly. It's to make Genorai better every time we solve it.

Build a Great Engineering Team

Hire, mentor, and develop engineers.

Create an environment where people take ownership, learn quickly, challenge ideas respectfully, and care deeply about the quality of what they build.

Set a high bar while helping people reach it.

Build Engineering Velocity

Establish the engineering practices that allow a small team to move fast without creating chaos.

Improve architecture, code quality, testing, CI/CD, observability, deployment, documentation, and developer tooling.

We value thoughtful engineering—but we don't confuse complexity with sophistication.

Why Coimbatore?

Genorai is deliberately being built from Coimbatore, in the heart of one of India's most important manufacturing and textile ecosystems.

We believe great manufacturing AI cannot be built at a distance from the problems it is meant to solve.

Our engineers get to understand how factories actually work, see their products being used in real operations, and learn directly from the people making thousands of decisions every day.

That proximity creates a much tighter loop between problem, product, deployment, and learning.

We call it zero distance to the customer.

Being close to the factory floor isn't a location constraint. It's part of how we build better products.

You'll Thrive Here If...

• You are fundamentally a builder.
• You still enjoy writing and reviewing code.
• You naturally take ownership instead of waiting for instructions.
• You're comfortable making good decisions with incomplete information.
• You care about architecture but never lose sight of shipping.
• You enjoy taking products from zero to one—and then making them reliable enough to scale.
• You like solving difficult problems across software, data, AI, and systems.
• You enjoy helping other engineers become better.
• You're curious about how customers actually use what you build.
• You care about whether technology creates real business value, not just whether it is technically interesting.

This role is not ideal for someone looking to move away from engineering into full-time people management.

We want someone who can lead through technical judgment, ownership, and building.

What You'll Bring

You don't need to match every item below, but strong candidates will have experience across several of these areas:

• Strong software engineering fundamentals
• Python and/or JavaScript/TypeScript
• Backend or full-stack product development
• System design, APIs, SQL, and data-intensive applications
• Cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure, or GCP
• LLM APIs, AI agents, tool/function calling, orchestration, and retrieval
• Building and evaluating production AI applications
• AI observability, evaluation, experimentation, and debugging
• Distributed systems, data pipelines, or event-driven architectures
• Enterprise integrations
• Docker, CI/CD, and modern DevOps practices
• Designing for reliability, security, performance, and scale
• Technical leadership, mentoring, and code/design reviews

Experience with frameworks and technologies such as OpenAI or Anthropic agent SDKs, LangGraph, Semantic Kernel, vector databases, model serving, Kubernetes, Digital Twins, or real-time systems is useful—but we care more about engineering judgment than familiarity with a particular framework.

You don't need to have trained a foundation model.

You do need to understand modern AI systems deeply enough to build reliable products around them.

Experience

We're primarily looking for someone with approximately 5–9 years of hands-on software engineering experience, including meaningful technical leadership and recent experience building AI-powered products or systems.

But years alone won't determine whether you're right for this role.

A great engineer who has built ambitious products, led others, and developed unusually quickly may have fewer years.

Likewise, years of management without recent hands-on building will not substitute for engineering depth.

Compensation & Ownership

This is a foundational engineering role, and we intend to compensate it accordingly.

We offer competitive cash compensation plus meaningful early-stage equity, with the final package reflecting experience, technical depth, and the scope of responsibility.

We're looking for someone who wants more than a salary—to have real influence over what gets built and participate in the value they help create.

Why Join Genorai?

• Build AI products that affect real manufacturing operations.
• Work on problems where AI, software, data, and the physical world meet.
• Make foundational architectural decisions while the product and company are still being built.
• Help hire and shape the engineering team that comes after you.
• Work directly with customers and see what happens when your software meets the real world.
• Build manufacturing AI from one of India's most important manufacturing ecosystems.
• Receive meaningful early-stage equity and participate in the value you help create.
• Help define the engineering culture, architecture, and technical foundations Genorai grows on.

This isn't an opportunity to join an engineering organization. It's an opportunity to help build one.

Position Details

Location: Neelambur, Coimbatore — On-site / Work from Office
Experience: Approximately 5–9 years of hands-on software engineering experience, with meaningful technical leadership and recent experience building AI-powered systems
Employment: Full-Time
Industry: AI Products | Manufacturing Technology
Compensation: Competitive cash compensation + meaningful early-stage equity

This is an on-site role because staying close to our customers and the problems we solve is fundamental to how we build.