Company Description

NikahForever is India’s leading Community Matrimony platform, dedicated to making marriages simple and accessible. We have proudly facilitated 5 million+ members. By leveraging AI-based algorithms, we streamline the process of searching and connecting with compatible profiles. Our platform redefines how people perceive and approach marriage, ensuring an easy and efficient experience.

Build the Team. Own the Architecture. Ship the Product. Solve the Hardest Problems.

Experience: Proven engineering leadership experience required

Preferred background: Strong product-based technology companies

Role: Hands-on Engineering Manager / Individual Contributor

Expectation: High ownership, high execution velocity, zero dependency on constant supervision The Role

We are looking for an engineering leader who can do both: build a high-performing engineering team and personally solve difficult engineering problems.

You are not someone who stopped coding after becoming a manager. You can review a system architecture, understand an unfamiliar codebase, investigate a production outage, write a critical service, build an AI agent, and still know how to hire, coach, challenge, and manage engineers effectively.

You can take an ambiguous business objective, translate it into an engineering strategy, break it into executable work, assign ownership, remove bottlenecks, and drive it to production.

When the team is moving fast, you multiply its output. When a critical technical problem is blocking delivery, you can get into the details and help solve it yourself.

You are technology-agnostic, obsessed with execution, comfortable with complexity, and actively exploring how AI and autonomous agents can change the way software is built.

We are not looking for a manager who needs a team to do the engineering for them but for an engineer who has developed the ability to make an entire team more effective without losing the ability to build themselves.

What You Will Own

- Engineering execution and delivery

- Take complete ownership of engineering delivery, from understanding business priorities to shipping reliable production systems.
- Convert ambiguous business objectives into transparent technical plans, milestones, priorities, and measurable outcomes.
- Drive execution across multiple projects without allowing dependencies, indecision, or coordination overhead to become excuses for delays.
- Identify bottlenecks early, make trade-offs decisively, and unblock the team without waiting for escalations.
- Maintain high execution velocity without accumulating reckless technical debt or compromising security and reliability.
- Ensure the team ships working software, not just completed tickets, merged pull requests, or impressive-looking roadmaps.
- Take direct ownership of critical deliverables when timelines or technical complexity demand hands-on intervention.

2. Hands-on engineering and technical leadership
- Remain technically credible through active coding, code reviews, debugging, system design, and production ownership.
- Design and build backend services, APIs, integrations, data pipelines, automations, and AI-powered systems as required.
- Navigate unfamiliar repositories and technology stacks without treating unfamiliarity as a blocker.
- Make sound architecture decisions based on business needs, scalability, reliability, maintainability, cost, and time to market.
- Diagnose complex production failures, performance bottlenecks, data inconsistencies,



and difficult integration issues.
- Establish engineering standards for code quality, testing, security, observability, deployment, and operational readiness.
- Know when to delegate, when to coach, and when to personally take the keyboard.

3. Team leadership and people management
- Build and manage a team of high-performing engineers with clear expectations, accountability, and ownership.
- Hire engineers who demonstrate exceptional problem-solving ability, technical depth, learning speed, and execution.
- Set a high engineering bar and address persistent performance issues directly and fairly.
- Coach engineers through difficult technical decisions instead of becoming the team's permanent debugging service.
- Develop engineers who can independently own systems, make decisions, and deliver outcomes.
- Create a culture where engineers challenge assumptions, surface problems early, take responsibility, and continuously improve.
- Balance delegation with hands-on involvement without becoming either a micromanager or an absent manager.
- Provide clear feedback, manage performance, resolve conflicts, and make difficult people decisions when necessary.

- AI-native and agentic engineering

We expect you to be an active practitioner of modern AI-assisted engineering, not someone who merely encourages the team to experiment with ChatGPT.
- Use AI coding agents to accelerate code exploration, implementation, debugging, testing, and refactoring.
- Build or integrate agentic workflows involving planning, tool calling, multi-step execution, external APIs, and verification.
- Identify engineering and business processes that can be automated using LLMs, agents, and conventional software.
- Establish practical workflows that increase engineering throughput without sacrificing correctness or security.
- Evaluate new AI tools based on measurable improvements in delivery speed, quality, and cost.
- Teach the team how to use AI effectively, review AI-generated code critically, and validate agent-driven changes.
- Personally prototype and ship AI-powered solutions rather than limiting your involvement to strategy and vendor selection.

We want a leader who uses AI to increase the output of the entire engineering organization, including their own.

- Cross-domain problem solving

You should be comfortable moving between fundamentally different technical challenges.

Depending on the problem, this may involve:

- Backend architecture, APIs, databases, caching, and distributed systems.
- Mobile, web, and end-to-end product workflows.
- Cloud infrastructure, CI/CD, observability, performance, and incident management.
- Payment gateways, third-party integrations, asynchronous workflows, and data consistency.
- AI applications, LLM integrations, agentic systems, and automation.
- Security, reliability, cost optimization, and scaling systems under real-world constraints.

- Business ownership

- Understand the business metrics behind the engineering roadmap.
- Prioritize work based on customer impact, revenue, risk, and engineering effort.
- Challenge unnecessary complexity,



low-value projects and choices that don't solve a meaningful problem.
- Make informed build-versus-buy decisions.
- Optimize infrastructure and engineering costs without creating fragile systems.
- Communicate technical risks, delivery trade-offs, and progress clearly to business stakeholders.

You are expected to understand not just whether something can be built, but whether it should be built, why it matters, and how quickly it needs to deliver value. The Non-Negotiable Bar

Technical credibility: You have personally built and shipped production software and can still reason deeply about code and architecture.

Independent execution: You do not need your manager to tell you what to prioritize, how to solve a problem, or how to unblock your team.

Leadership without hiding behind delegation: You can manage through others while remaining capable of direct technical contribution.

Breadth of experience: You have dealt with different classes of engineering problems and can adapt beyond your primary specialization.

AI-native thinking: You actively use AI and agentic workflows to improve individual and team productivity.

Accountability: When a project fails, you investigate the causes, own your part, correct the course, and prevent avoidable recurrence.

People leadership: You can attract, develop, challenge, and retain strong engineers while addressing underperformance directly.

What We Do Not Want

- A people manager who has lost the ability to understand or contribute to the code.
- A project manager whose primary output is meetings, status reports, and Jira updates.
- An architect who produces diagrams but cannot validate implementation details.
- A hands-off manager who delegates every difficult technical problem.
- A micromanager who becomes the approval bottleneck for every decision.

What Success Looks Like
- The team consistently ships high-quality software with predictable execution.
- Engineers operate with greater independence and take meaningful ownership.
- Architectural and technical decisions improve the product rather than create unnecessary complexity.
- Critical production issues are diagnosed and resolved systematically.
- AI and automation measurably improve engineering throughput.
- Engineering resources are allocated to the highest-impact problems.
- You can step into the hardest technical problems without becoming a permanent bottleneck.

Interview Process

- Technical deep dive: Walk us through complex systems you have personally designed, built, shipped, or operated.
- Live problem solving: Debug an unfamiliar codebase, investigate a failure, or solve a practical engineering problem.
- System design: Design a production system and defend your choices around reliability, scale, security, cost, and delivery speed.
- AI-agent exercise: Use an AI coding agent to solve a bounded engineering task and demonstrate how you verify its work.
- Engineering management scenarios: Handle missed commitments, underperformance, technical disagreements, competing priorities, and team bottlenecks.
- Execution review: Explain a difficult project you owned, the decisions you made, what went wrong, and the measurable result.
- Ownership verification: Distinguish what you personally contributed from what the team delivered.

We will evaluate the reasoning behind your decisions, not just the final answers. The expectation is simple: lead the team, own the outcome, understand the technology, and be ready to build when it matters.

📌 Engineering Manager (New Delhi)
🏢 NikahForever
📍 New Delhi