About Zeroto1

Zeroto1 builds enterprise AI systems around important business workflows. We bring together models, enterprise data, business context, applications, workflows, and human decisions to build AI systems that are secure, observable, governed, and useful in day-to-day operations.

Lighthouse is the platform accelerator beneath this work. Its Context Layer standardizes business meaning, permissions, evidence, and access between enterprise data and AI applications, while the broader platform provides connectivity, workflow orchestration, evaluation, governance, and operations.

The Role

As Principal Engineer, you will be the senior technical leader responsible for architectural coherence across Lighthouse and the systems it powers.

This is a deeply hands-on role. You will define critical system boundaries and engineering standards, while personally designing, coding, and reviewing the highest-risk components across enterprise data, AI, workflows, permissions, and customer-controlled infrastructure.

What You Will Own

- Set and evolve the architecture across the Lighthouse Context Layer, data and execution adapters, workflow and agent runtime, evaluation, and production operations.
- Define durable platform contracts and abstractions that enable reuse across customers and use cases without creating one-off forks.
- Own security and deployment architecture across shared, dedicated, and customer-hosted environments, including identity, authorization, isolation, audit, and policy enforcement.
- Design reliable execution for deterministic and AI-driven workflows, including state, approvals, retries, idempotency, failure recovery, replay, and rollback.
- Establish engineering standards for AI quality and operations across evaluation, tracing, grounding, reliability, latency, cost, and model/tool fallback.
- Make pragmatic build-vs-buy and open-source decisions, turning proven patterns into reusable services, APIs, connectors, SDKs, and platform capabilities.




- Personally build and review components with the greatest architectural, security, performance, or operational risk, while mentoring engineers and driving technical decisions.

What Success Looks Like Lighthouse has clear system boundaries and stable contracts. New use cases reuse platform capabilities rather than creating hidden coupling or customer-specific systems.

AI workflows are permission-aware, explainable, observable, and production-grade, with measurable quality, reliability, latency, cost, and business outcomes.

What You Bring

- 8+ years building production software, with senior technical leadership across distributed, data-intensive, platform, or enterprise systems.
- Deep hands-on strength in Python, APIs and services, relational data, asynchronous/event-driven systems, and cloud-native engineering .
- Strong experience with system architecture, identity and authorization, observability, isolation/multi-tenancy, and failure recovery.
- Experience taking AI/ML systems into production , including structured outputs, tool use, retrieval/context, evaluation, guardrails, and debugging.
- Strong judgment around system boundaries, scalability, security, data ownership, build-vs-buy decisions, and appropriate abstraction.
- A track record of leading through influence while remaining close to code, production behavior, and customer outcomes.

Useful, But Not Required Experience with knowledge graphs or semantic systems, workflow engines, data/developer platforms, multi-tenant SaaS, or customer-hosted enterprise software.

Familiarity with technologies such as FastAPI/Pydantic, PostgreSQL, Redis, queues/events, MCP, vector/graph stores, Docker/Kubernetes, and AWS/Azure/GCP is a plus.

Why Zeroto1

Work at the intersection of enterprise data, business context, AI, workflows, and security .

- You will help define a platform while its most significant architectural contracts are still being shaped—and build technology designed to become part of how enterprises operate, not another AI prototype or thin model wrapper.

📌 Principal Engineer – Applied AI (India)
🏢 Zero to 1
📍 India