Staff Software Engineer / Tech Lead, Applied AI and Platform

About Big Leap

Big Leap builds software and AI systems for enterprise teams. We work on data platforms, research tools, automated workflows, enterprise integrations, and complex product development.

We are a small team. Engineers work closely with our founders, clients, and the people using what we build. We move quickly and take responsibility for getting our systems into production.

Stay connected

Before you apply, take a look at our LinkedIn page. We share company updates, new roles, product launches, and lessons from our engineering work.

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https://www.linkedin.com/company/bigleapllc

About the role

We are looking for a hands-on Staff Software Engineer who can lead a small engineering team.

You will technically lead early-career engineers. You will help them plan their work, make good technical decisions, review their code, and solve problems when they get stuck.

You will also continue to write code. This is not a project management or coordination-only role. Around 60 to 70 percent of your time will be spent on system design, implementation, debugging, and code review.

You will work closely with Big Leaps founders and senior engineers.

What you will do

- Own the technical design and delivery of important projects.
- Lead two engineers and help them become stronger and more independent.
- Turn changing requirements into a clear technical plan.
- Break projects into well-scoped tasks with clear owners and deadlines.
- Review designs, pull requests, tests, and deployment plans.
- Take on the hardest parts of the system yourself.
- Build backend services, APIs, data pipelines, and long-running workflows.
- Integrate AI models, agents, tools, data sources, and third-party systems.
- Design systems with retries, recovery, monitoring, and clear failure states.
- Debug problems across application code, databases,



cloud services, permissions, and deployments.
- Improve automated tests, AI evaluations, CI/CD, alerts, and runbooks.
- Join technical discussions with clients when needed.
- Raise risks early and keep the team focused on the most important work.

What we are looking for

- 4 or more years of professional software engineering experience.
- Strong backend, platform, or distributed systems experience.
- Experience leading at least two engineers while still writing production code.
- Strong skills in TypeScript, Node.js, Python, or a similar backend language.
- Experience designing and operating APIs and asynchronous systems.
- Knowledge of queues, workers, PostgreSQL, object storage, and data contracts.
- Experience with AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud.
- Strong production debugging skills.
- Experience using logs, metrics, traces, and database state to find root causes.
- Experience building or integrating production AI or LLM systems.
- Good judgment around security, credentials, access controls, and customer data.
- Clear written and spoken English.
- The ability to explain technical decisions to engineers and non-technical stakeholders.
- Comfort working with changing requirements and external dependencies.
- Reliable availability during [add exact working hours].

Helpful experience Experience in any of these areas would be useful:

- LangGraph or other agent orchestration tools
- LLM tool calling and agent workflows
- Retrieval and vector search
- AI evaluation frameworks
- Next.js and React
- Express or similar backend frameworks
- SQS,



Pub/Sub, or other queue systems
- Docker and Kubernetes
- CI/CD and release automation
- Enterprise authentication and SSO
- Financial or research data
- Automated report or document generation
- Enterprise client work
- Legacy system modernization

You do not need experience with every technology listed above. We care more about solid engineering fundamentals and good production judgment. How we expect you to lead

We are not looking for someone who simply assigns tickets.

A strong technical lead at Big Leap:

- Gives engineers enough context to make good decisions.
- Reviews work without becoming a bottleneck.
- Knows when to coach and when to step in directly.
- Makes ownership and deadlines clear.
- Keeps technical debt visible.
- Protects testing, security, and recovery work.
- Gives bad news early.
- Helps the team learn from incidents and delivery problems.
- Leaves systems easier to understand and operate.

Your first 90 days In your first 30 days, you will learn the architecture, current projects, team strengths, and main technical risks. By 60 days, you will own the delivery plan for an important project. You will be leading the two engineers and shipping production code alongside them.

By 90 days, you should have removed a recurring source of failure, delay, or manual work. You should also have added something reusable, such as a test, alert, evaluation, runbook, or better system interface.

The team should be delivering with more clarity and less day-to-day help from the founders.

Why join Big Leap

- Work on difficult systems with real users.
- Own important technical decisions.
- Stay close to the code.
- Lead a small team without layers of management.
- Work directly with experienced founders, engineers, and client teams.
- Help productionize modern AI and data systems.
- See the effect of your work quickly.

📌 Staff Software Engineer (Hyderabad)
🏢 Big Leap
📍 Hyderabad