Head of Engineering

Location: Hyderabad, Telangana, India
Workplace: Remote
Employment Type: Full-time
Experience: 8–10+ years

About the job

What We Do

Handil is building Messaging 2.0 — a privacy-first communication platform designed around simpler communication, smarter connections, and greater user control.

We believe messaging should give people more control over how they connect, communicate, organize information, and manage their data.

Handil is being built around experiences such as privacy-focused connections, usernames and QR-based connections, user-controlled storage, smarter media management, and more intentional communication.

Our goal is to rethink messaging from the ground up while keeping the experience simple, secure, and dependable.

Learn more at handilapp.com.

Who We Look For

We’re looking for an experienced, hands-on Head of Engineering to help build Handil’s technical foundation and engineering organization.

You’ll work closely with the founders, product, design, and engineering teams to transform product vision into scalable, secure, and reliable technology.

This role is ideal for someone who enjoys building from 0→1, making important architecture decisions, mentoring engineers, and creating strong engineering practices without unnecessary complexity.

You should be comfortable thinking strategically about long-term architecture while also helping teams make practical decisions and ship high-quality products today.

Key Responsibilities

• Define and own Handil’s overall technical architecture and engineering strategy.
• Lead architecture across backend, mobile, cloud, messaging, storage, security, and platform engineering.
• Design scalable real-time messaging, synchronization, notification, and media-delivery systems.
• Establish engineering standards, coding practices, testing strategies, and development processes.
• Guide technical decisions around APIs, databases, caching, event-driven systems, cloud infrastructure, and distributed systems.
• Partner closely with Android and iOS teams to build reliable mobile-to-backend experiences.
• Establish strong security and privacy practices across the platform.
• Build observability, reliability, CI/CD, monitoring, and incident-management practices.
• Review architecture and technical designs and help teams make thoughtful trade-offs.
• Mentor senior engineers and help develop future technical leaders.
• Build and grow a high-performing engineering organization.
• Partner with product and design teams to translate user needs into practical technical solutions.
• Identify technical risks early and help teams balance speed, quality, scalability, and maintainability.
• Create a culture centered around ownership, collaboration, learning, and engineering excellence.

Basic Qualifications

• 8–10+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• Strong experience designing and building scalable production systems.
• Experience leading engineering teams or major technical initiatives.
• Deep understanding of distributed systems and backend architecture.
• Experience with real-time systems, messaging platforms, synchronization, or event-driven architectures.
• Strong knowledge of APIs, databases, caching, asynchronous processing, and scalable backend services.
• Experience with technologies such as Java, Kotlin, Go, or similar backend languages.
• Experience with PostgreSQL, Redis, Kafka, or comparable technologies.
• Strong cloud experience with AWS, GCP, Azure, or similar platforms.
• Experience with containers, Kubernetes, and cloud-native development.
• Strong understanding of application security, authentication, authorization, and data protection.
• Experience building or supporting consumer-facing applications.
• Strong debugging, system-design, and performance-optimization skills.
• Excellent communication and technical leadership skills.
• Ability to make thoughtful technical trade-offs in an early-stage environment.
• Strong ownership mindset and passion for building products from the ground up.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience building large-scale messaging or communication platforms.
• Experience with mobile-first consumer products.
• Experience with offline-first or multi-device synchronization.
• Experience designing media storage and delivery systems.
• Experience scaling platforms to large user populations.
• Previous startup or 0→1 product experience.
• Experience hiring and growing engineering teams.
• Experience with privacy-focused or security-sensitive products.
• Familiarity with AI-assisted development tools such as GitHub Copilot, ChatGPT, Claude, or similar technologies.

What You’ll Help Build

As Head of Engineering, you’ll have significant influence over:

• Platform architecture
• Messaging infrastructure
• Backend systems
• Mobile architecture
• Cloud infrastructure
• Security and privacy strategy
• Engineering standards
• Technology selection
• Hiring and team growth
• Engineering culture
• Long-term technical direction

This is an opportunity to help establish the engineering foundation of Handil rather than simply inherit an existing one.

How We Work

We value people who:

• Understand the problem before choosing the solution.
• Take ownership from idea through production.
• Communicate risks and uncertainty early.
• Make thoughtful technical trade-offs.
• Build simple systems where simple systems are enough.
• Invest in stronger foundations where reliability, privacy, and scale demand it.
• Challenge assumptions respectfully.
• Learn from real product behavior.
• Care deeply about the quality of what they build.

Why Handil

Communication is one of the most important technologies people use every day, yet there is still significant opportunity to rethink how people connect and control the information created through those interactions.

At Handil, you’ll have the opportunity to influence the product and engineering organization at an early stage and help shape how the platform evolves.

If you enjoy solving difficult engineering problems, building strong teams, and creating products from the ground up, we’d love to hear from you.

How to Apply

Apply through the Handil Careers page:

handilapp.com/careers

For questions about the role or hiring process, contact:

[email protected]

Handil — Messaging 2.0

Private communication. Smarter connections. More control.

Connect. Chat. Care.