Job Description

Role name: Senior Manager - Technology, Bangalore

Experience: 8 to 15 years

Salary: 16 to 18 LPA

About the role

This role works directly with micro-businesses—small retail shop owners, local vendors, and home-based producers. These users operate on thin margins, in patchy network conditions, often with limited digital literacy, and almost exclusively in regional languages. Very little off-the-shelf software fits their unique context and operational realities.

We are looking for an individual to own that technology stack end-to-end: field data collection through our frontline community network, WhatsApp-first delivery directly to micro-business owners, voice and vernacular interfaces, the data layer driving our impact measurement, and the AI systems we are bringing into production.

This is a hands-on technology role, with team management. You will set the roadmap alongside program leadership, decide what we build and what we deliberately don't, and grow a small team.

What you'll own

Technology direction

Own the technology roadmap jointly with program leadership — including deciding what to build, what to buy, and what to stop doing

• Make architecture and sequencing decisions
• Own reliability, cloud cost, and security posture for all systems

Building

• Design and build web and mobile applications that hold up in low-bandwidth and intermittently connected areas — offline-first, low-data, low-end Android
• Build voice-first and vernacular interfaces for users with low digital literacy
• Identify where AI meaningfully improves field operations including evaluation, guardrails, and inference cost control
• Build the data layer that powers impact measurement and funder reporting: pipelines from Saathi field collection through to defined metrics, with data quality and lineage

Team and partners

• Hire, mentor, and grow the engineering team
• Manage external technology partners, vendors, and other engineering collaborations
• Set engineering practice — review, testing, documentation, incident response — proportionate to a small team rather than ceremony for its own sake

Data responsibility

Own privacy and consent design for data, including obligations under India's DPDP Act and the data commitments we make in grant agreements

Skills and experience

Essential

• 8–15 years building software, with strong programming fundamentals and real problem-solving depth — able to go deep in at least one language and pick up others quickly
• Solid database work: schema design, query design and performance, and modelling for
• Production experience with AI-native applications — systems real users depend on, not prototypes
• Fluency with agentic coding tools (Claude Code, Cursor, or similar) to ship quality code at high velocity
• Strong grasp of web application design — APIs, authentication, state, caching, failure modes
• Experience leading or mentoring engineers
• Clear written and spoken communication, and the ability to explain a technical tradeoffs

Nice to have

• Built for low-bandwidth, rural, or offline-first contexts in India
• WhatsApp Business API or comparable messaging platforms at scale
• Speech technology (ASR/TTS) or Indic-language NLP
• Data engineering and analytics pipeline ownership
• Cloud infrastructure ownership on AWS or GCP, infrastructure-as-code, and cost management

Mindsets we're looking for

• A genuine pull towards social impact — one that shows up in the tradeoffs you make, not only in your interest in the sector
• Comfort with ambiguous and shifting requirements, and a habit of helping set the requirements rather than waiting to receive them
• Appetite for field immersion. You will spend time in markets with Saathis and Vyapaaris. This is not optional color — it is how you will know what to build
• Low ego about code, high standards about outcomes.

Hiring Note: Applications will be reviewed on rolling basis. This job is first posted on September 8th, 2026 on Ground Zero

For any questions, ping us on WhatsApp chat: +91-8058331557