PHONEX INDIA DEVELOPMENT & INNOVATION CENTER

 

Founding Principal Engineer, India

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Location: Kochi (preferred) · Remote within India considered for exceptional candidates

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Experience: 8–14 years

 

Reports to: CTO & US Engineering Leadership

 

About PhoneX India

We are setting up PhoneX India in Kochi as a core extension of our US product engineering organization. This is not an offshore delivery, client staffing, or back-office engineering role. The goal is to build a serious product engineering, platform operations, and innovation hub in India. The person in this role will help define the technical foundation, engineering culture, hiring bar, and operating model for PhoneX India from the beginning. Learn more about PhoneX India.

 

The Role

We are looking for a deeply hands-on senior engineer who can become the technical nucleus of PhoneX India. This person will work directly with the CTO and US engineering leadership on real production systems, architecture decisions, platform evolution, AI adoption, engineering standards, and the formation of the early India team. This role is ideal for someone who enjoys going deep into large production codebases, understanding actual system behavior, solving difficult engineering problems, and earning technical credibility through hands-on contribution.

 

What You'll Do

• Contribute directly to production systems, architecture decisions, and platform evolution alongside US engineering leadership

• Set the technical foundation, engineering culture, and hiring bar for PhoneX India

• Drive the operating model and engineering standards for the new center

• Lead pragmatic AI adoption across product capability, developer productivity, and platform reliability

• Mentor and grow the early India engineering team

• Go deep into code and production issues as needed — this is not a purely advisory or managerial role

 

Ideal Profile

• 8 to 14 years of strong engineering experience

• Strong TypeScript and Node.js backend experience

• Deep experience building and operating cloud-native SaaS systems on AWS

• Good understanding of serverless, event-driven, API-driven, and distributed systems

• Comfort across React, TypeScript, Java/Spring Boot, relational databases, caching, CI/CD, observability, and production operations

• Ability to navigate large, multi-repository production codebases

• Strong debugging ability, ownership mindset, and architectural judgment

• Experience mentoring engineers, influencing technical direction, and raising engineering standards

• Genuine interest in using AI seriously and pragmatically to improve product capability, developer productivity, platform operations, and system reliability

 

What Makes This Different

The right person will have real influence over architecture, engineering standards, hiring, AI-enabled development practices, production systems, and the long-term technical foundation of PhoneX India. We are looking for someone who can think architecturally, operate pragmatically, and still go deep into code and production issues as needed.

 

Compensation: Strong compensation and meaningful long-term founding team upside for the right candidate.

 

How to Apply: Please feel free to forward this to people you genuinely believe are strong, credible, and capable of becoming a foundational technical leader. Even if they are not actively looking, we'd be happy to have a direct conversation if the opportunity sounds interesting.