Founding Engineering Manager (0→1 Platform, Future CTO Track)

About Gravton Labs Gravton Labs is a research and deployment lab building the Operating System for AI Visibility to Agentic Action. As the internet shifts from human browsing to AI-mediated discovery, commerce, and autonomous actions, businesses face a binary reality: they are either legible and trusted by AI agents or they disappear. We are building the infrastructure that ensures companies remain visible, authoritative, and actionable in this new internet.

We design infrastructure-grade systems—analytics, content engines, governance protocols, and experimentation layers—that allow high-growth, high-ambition companies to own their AI-facing surface area across websites and apps in the age of ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity. Our architecture balances stability and authority with velocity and precision, enabling real-time insight, compliant execution, and controlled agentic action across Marketing, Product, and Security teams.

We are pre-product and pre-revenue, currently onboarding our first design partners across legal, e-commerce, and SaaS. As we move from concept to product, we are looking for a founding Engineering Manager to build the core system and the team behind it—someone who thinks in systems, sweats execution, and wants to grow into a long-term technical leader.

About the Role This is a founding role for an exceptional Engineering Manager with 5–7 years of experience who still enjoys writing code and thinking deeply about systems. You will join at the ground floor and own the technical execution of our core platform—from first principles to production, while balancing needs for research to deciding when to execute.

You will not inherit a large team or a polished roadmap. Instead, you will work directly with the Founder and the current engineering team to translate product epics—like Identity Graph ingestion, AI visibility analytics, content engines, and agent governance—into scalable, secure, and opinionated systems. You will also deal with chaos and help us decide when to anchor.

In the early phase, you will be both builder and leader. You will design architectures, review pull requests, make complex trade-offs, and gradually hire and mentor the team that executes alongside you. This role is designed for someone who aspires to grow into a future CTO as the company scales.

Key Responsibilities System Architecture & Technical Direction:

You will own the end-to-end architecture of the Gravton platform. This includes backend services, data pipelines, APIs, and frontend foundations. You will design systems that are modular, observable, and resilient—optimized for speed without sacrificing correctness or security. Backend & Data Foundations:

Our product depends on ingesting, processing, and reasoning over large volumes of structured and unstructured data (web content, prompts, competitors, schemas, agent activity). You will design backend systems for ingestion, indexing, analytics, and real-time updates, with a strong bias toward clean interfaces and long-term maintainability. Frontend & Developer Experience:

While you may not be a UI specialist, you will have strong instincts for frontend architecture. You will help define how complex concepts—AI visibility data pipelines, prompt/visibility tracking, approval workflows, and governance controls—are expressed clearly and reliably in the product. You care about performance, state management, and developer ergonomics. Agentic & AI-First Thinking:

You will work closely on systems that interact with LLMs, RAG pipelines, and agent workflows. This includes prompt orchestration, evaluation loops, structured outputs, and safety/compliance constraints. You don’t need to be an AI researcher, but you must think natively about systems where AI is part of the control flow, not a bolt-on. Execution & Quality Bar:

You will set the engineering bar. This means insisting on code quality, sensible abstractions, testing discipline, and pragmatic documentation—without slowing the team down unnecessarily. You understand when to move fast and when to be precise. Team Building & Leadership:

As we grow, you will hire, mentor, and lead a small, high-quality engineering team. You will help define roles, establish working norms, and create a culture that values ownership, clarity, and technical rigor. Early on, this is a bootstrap environment—you are comfortable with ambiguity and limited resources.

What We’re Looking For: A top-tier engineering background, like IIT, BITS, NIT, or leading global universities, is preferred, or an equivalent track record that clearly demonstrates exceptional technical ability and ambition. 5–7 years of experience building and shipping production systems, ideally in B2B SaaS, developer platforms, data-heavy products, or infrastructure-adjacent domains. Strong backend fundamentals. You are fluent in designing APIs, data models, async workflows, and distributed systems, and you understand trade-offs around performance, consistency, and cost. Solid frontend instincts. You have worked closely enough with modern frontend stacks to design clean interfaces between frontend and backend and to guide implementation decisions thoughtfully. A builder’s mindset. You are comfortable being hands-on, especially early on. You enjoy debugging, designing, and shipping—not just managing tickets. Leadership potential. You may not have managed large teams yet, but you demonstrate clear ownership, mentorship, and technical leadership. You want to grow into a CTO-level role over time. Strong interest in AI, LLMs, and agentic systems. Prior experience is a plus, but curiosity, depth of thinking, and intent matter more than buzzwords. Comfort with ambiguity. You can take a PRFAQ, product epics, or a rough system sketch and turn it into a working architecture without needing everything spelled out.

What You’ll Get Front seat in how the Agentic Internet is being built. You will gain deep exposure to how AI systems discover, evaluate, and act on information, and how infrastructure must evolve to support this shift. 0→1 Engineering at Depth. You will help take a complex, research-driven product from early prototypes to a production-grade platform used by real customers. Long-Term Technical Leadership. You will shape the technical foundations, hiring bar, and engineering culture of the company, with a clear path toward becoming a senior technical leader or CTO. Strategic Product Influence. This is not a “requirements-only” role. You will actively influence what we build, how we build it, and why—working directly with the Founder and early customers.