Founding Engineer

Founding Engineer / Tech Lead, Hot Takes Location: India (mandatory), Hybrid/Remote with in-person travel once a month Type: Full-time, equity-heavy, with a clear path to co-founder Reports to: Co-Founder & CEO

About Hot Takes Hot Takes is a DPIIT-recognized, AI-powered, gamified consumer intelligence platform for Indian D2C and consumer brands. We turn weeks of traditional research into decision-ready insights using proprietary gamified study mechanics and a deployed multi-agent AI research pipeline. We’re incubated at VelTech and Sona Star Incubator, with enterprise clients including Modenik (Dixcy Scott, Slimz) and Voltas Beko. The core platform is live, the agentic pipeline is deployed, and we have paying clients. We need someone to scale it all and build what comes next.

The Role This is a co-founder-track seat. You’ll join full-time with meaningful equity, with the explicit expectation that we convert if we prove the fit. You’ll own the full stack across our three-sided platform (respondents, brand admins, internal ops), scale our deployed multi-agent AI pipeline, and build new capabilities in the primary research space independently, without a team beneath you. We have a clear product roadmap. We need someone who executes against it, tells us when we’re wrong, and solves the problem instead of waiting for a rewrite. We want someone who codes AI-forward, using tools like Cursor or Copilot to move fast, not someone who treats AI as an afterthought.

Stack

• Languages and Frameworks: Python, JavaScript/TypeScript, React or Next.js, Node.js
• AI and Agentic: Anthropic/OpenAI APIs, LangChain or LangGraph (or equivalent), prompt
• engineering, multi-step agent design, RAG pipelines
• AI Dev Tools: Cursor, GitHub Copilot, or equivalent. Active use, not awareness.
• Infrastructure: REST APIs, PostgreSQL, cloud (AWS/GCP/Azure), Docker If your stack differs but you can demonstrate the thinking and the ship speed, we’ll still talk.

What We’re Looking For Someone who has built and shipped full-stack products independently. Real, production- grade experience with LLMs and agentic systems, not just API calls. Founder instincts: comfortable with ambiguity, focused on trade-offs, not tickets. The ability to push back when the plan has a flaw and then find the fix. A genuine drive to learn and level up when the problem outgrows current knowledge. Years of experience are not a filter. Skill level and learning velocity are. Must be based in India. In-person availability is required roughly once a month.

How to Apply Send your background and something you’ve built to aastha@hottakes.club (cc vishrutha@hottakes.club ) with the subject line: Hot Take: I can be your co-founder We’d rather see something scrappy you shipped in two weeks than something polished that took six months.