Engineering Lead

Location: Kochi, Delhi NCR (Full-time, On-site)

Company: Intelo.ai

About Intelo

Intelo is a transformation partner building AI agents that drive efficiency, accuracy, and growth across businesses. We solve critical retail and supply chain workflows using purpose-built AI technology.

Our platform enables retailers to:

- Forecast demand accurately
- Reduce excess inventory
- Improve sell-through
- Make faster, smarter decisions

We operate at the intersection of AI, data engineering, and product thinking - building systems that translate complex data into real business outcomes.

Role Overview

We are looking for an Engineering Lead to run a pod of engineers delivering one or more of our core areas - demand forecasting, allocation and rebalancing, replenishment, merchandise planning, or the reporting and reasoning layers that tie them together.

This is a player-coach role, not a management layer. You will lead 4-6 engineers, own what your pod ships and when, and stay hands-on in design and code. Intelo releases weekly to enterprise retail customers across dev, UAT, and production, so the job is to make that cadence predictable: break work down honestly, hold dates, catch design problems before they reach a customer, and grow the engineers around you.

You will work closely with Product, Implementation, Integrations, and our architecture group, and you will be accountable for outcomes rather than activity.

What We Expect from Every Engineering Leader at Intelo

This is part of our operating philosophy.

Here to Make a Difference

- Challenges the status quo
- Experiments boldly
- Adapts when the ground shifts

Open by Default
- Raises concerns early
- Shares knowledge transparently

Owns It
- Takes initiative
- Follows process even when it's hard
- Makes decisions with context - not escalation

Product Over Tickets
- Thinks from the customer backwards
- Fights unnecessary complexity
- Automates repetitive work

Always Learning
- Seeks deep understanding
- Uses AI as leverage to improve thinking and output
- Continuously upgrades technical and leadership judgment

Key Responsibilities

Team Leadership

- Lead, coach, and grow a pod of 4-6 engineers - regular 1:1s, clear expectations, honest feedback
- Set the craft bar for your area: design quality, code review standards, testing discipline
- Identify and develop the next senior engineers on your team; hire ahead of need and raise the bar with every addition
- Create an environment where engineers raise concerns early rather than absorbing them quietly

Delivery Ownership




- Own what your pod commits to and delivers on a weekly release cadence
- Break large requirements into modules and stories your team can estimate and ship incrementally
- Plan backwards from the committed date, keep the slack where it belongs, and surface a gap the week it appears
- Report status honestly. The worst outcome is not a missed date - it is leadership learning about a problem after it has become a crisis

Hands-On Engineering
- Stay technical: design the hard parts, review the important changes, and write code where it matters most
- Make architectural calls within your area and know when to pull in the architecture group
- Debug the difficult production problems alongside your team, not from a distance

Technical Quality
- Own correctness in a data-heavy product: what "done" and "right" mean for a forecast, an allocation, or a plan
- Insist on tests that can actually fail - a test that duplicates the logic it covers is not protection
- Keep CI gates meaningful and fast, and treat a flaky check as a defect
- Reduce complexity actively; refactor before a design collapses rather than after

Multi-Tenant Leverage
- Push the team toward configuration over code: a client request answered as a setting serves every future client, while a bespoke branch is a permanent tax
- Weigh every customisation against what it costs to support across a growing client base
- Build so the next onboarding is cheaper than the last

Production Ownership
- Own your area in production - reliability, performance, cost, and the alerting that catches problems before customers do
- Drive incidents to root cause and turn each one into a permanent guardrail rather than a one-off fix
- Make sure silent failure is designed out: systems should not be able to report success while doing less

Cross-Functional Leadership
- Partner with Product on scope, sequencing, and trade-offs - and push back with reasoning when needed
- Work with Implementation and Integrations so what you ship survives contact with real client data
- Communicate clearly across the company: decisions, risks, and progress, without waiting to be asked

AI as Leverage




- Use AI heavily and set the standard for how your team uses it - throughput matters, but verification is now the job
- Hold the bar on reviewing AI-assisted work as rigorously as any other change
- Keep decisions and reasoning visible, so faster individual output does not become team-wide divergence

Required Qualifications
- 7+ years building production software, with 2+ years leading engineers (tech lead, team lead, or engineering manager who stayed hands-on)
- Strong backend engineering depth in Python and/or TypeScript, with sound system design instincts
- Track record of delivering complex, data-intensive systems predictably - and of owning the date, not just the code
- Experience breaking ambiguous requirements into estimable work and holding a team to it
- Demonstrated ability to grow engineers: mentoring, review, and honest developmental feedback
- Strong written and verbal communication; can explain a trade-off to product, to a customer, and to an engineer
- Comfortable operating hands-on and strategically at the same time
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field, or equivalent practical experience

Preferred Experience We would prefer engineering leaders with experience in:
- Retail, supply chain, demand planning, or enterprise B2B SaaS
- Multi-tenant products where clients differ structurally, not just by configuration value
- Data-intensive systems: Databricks / Spark, batch and streaming pipelines, PostgreSQL
- AI/ML or agent-based systems in production (LangGraph, A2A, MCP concepts, evaluation harnesses)
- Cloud platforms and infrastructure as code (Azure and Terraform preferred)
- Fast-moving, weekly-release environments with dev / UAT / production promotion

What This Role Owns at Intelo An Engineering Lead at Intelo:
- Owns delivery for their area - scope, quality, and date
- Stays close enough to the code to have real technical judgement
- Grows engineers rather than routing work around them
- Chooses configuration over bespoke code, every time it is defensible
- Says the uncomfortable thing early, with context
- Takes accountability for outcomes, not activity

Why Join Intelo
- Lead a pod solving real retail problems with measurable business impact
- Genuine autonomy - you own your area, its architecture, and its outcomes
- Small senior team, short path from decision to production
- Shape engineering practice at a stage where it is still being set
- Fast-moving, product-first setting
- Culture that rewards initiative and deep thinking

📌 Lead Engineer (Kochi)
🏢 Intelo.ai
📍 Kochi