Head of Technology

What are we looking for?

We are looking to hire a Head of Technology, with a clear path to becoming a CTO within 12 months of performance review. As a Head of Technology you will lead all technology functions and work directly with our Co-Founder & CPO.

Hunch has a well-defined tech structure, with dedicated track leads for DevOps, Frontend, Backend, Core Engineering, Data Science, and Quality, comprising a total of 35 engineers. In this role, you will take ownership of these tracks both from an architectural and managerial perspective with responsibilities as under:

Key Responsibilities:Engineering Leadership:

• Own the overall technology strategy and architecture to meet business goals, ensuring scalability, performance, and security.
• Lead a cross-functional team of 35 engineers, including Backend, Frontend, DevOps, Data Science and Quality.
• Foster a culture of technical excellence, where developers write their own test cases and take responsibility of the quality they deliver
• Implement and enforce best practices in coding, design, testing, and operations.
• Lead the team through all stages of the product development lifecycle, from design to delivery.

Product Development and Feature Delivery:

• Drive the timely execution of product features and roadmaps to support the company’s business objectives.
• Collaborate with the product team to define clear priorities and ensure alignment between product and engineering teams.
• Ensure an optimal balance between feature velocity, technical debt management, and system stability.

Performance and Scalability:

• Drive the mission to bring down latency of top 20 APIs to 50ms.
• Drive mission of ANR rates < 0.18% always
• We see 300K MAUs today across US & India. You’ll drive a design that should be able to support 10x traffic.
• Monitor system performance and drive initiatives to improve app performance across the frontend and backend.
• Identify bottlenecks and lead efforts to continuously optimize the infrastructure for higher loads.

Security and Compliance:

• Ensure the security of our platform by implementing industry-standard practices for data protection, access control, and incident response.
• Work with legal and compliance teams to maintain necessary compliance with industry standards and regulatory requirements.

Cost and Resource Management:

• Manage the technology budget efficiently, optimizing infrastructure costs while ensuring high system availability and performance.
• Drive cost saving projects where expensive 3rd party tools can be built inhouse 
• Oversee the cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, or similar) and negotiate vendor contracts to minimize expenses without sacrificing quality.

Team Building and Mentorship:

• Foster a self managed ownership driven culture 
• Cultivate an environment of continuous learning, ensuring engineers are up-to-date on the latest technologies and practices.
• Promote a collaborative, inclusive, and productive work culture that aligns with Hunch’s values.

Must Haves for the Role:

• Experience: 10+ years of experience in software development and engineering management, with 3+ years in a leadership role. Must have experience scaling technology in a high-growth startup environment.
• Leadership: Proven track record of leading diverse engineering teams (Backend, Frontend, DevOps, Data Science) and delivering high-quality, scalable software solutions. 
• Tech stack - Knowhow of both frontend and backend stacks eg NodeJS, GoLang, Python, Flutter, ReactNative. Knowledge of databases like PostgreSQL, Mongo, Firestore  and experience in migrating code between stacks
• Product-Focused: Ability to align technology efforts with business objectives, with experience working closely with product management teams. Proven record of creation of event driven architectures
• Scalability & Performance: Expertise in designing and managing high-traffic, high-availability systems, with hands-on experience scaling systems to millions of users. Expertise in building fast search systems with caching and elastic search.
• Cloud Experience: Strong experience with cloud platforms (AWS/GCP), CI/CD pipelines, and containerized applications (Kubernetes).
• Security Expertise: In-depth understanding of security practices for web and mobile applications, including encryption, authentication, and compliance. Understanding of building secure systems with WAF and VPC

Quality Expertise -  Experience of being on top of the list of production bugs to ensure maximum functional quality. Experience in implementing test coverage for both backend and frontend Monitoring: Using tools like Newrelic/ datadog/ grafana to keep track of metrics. Create escalation matrices to manage deviations.

• Communication Skills: Ability to clearly communicate complex technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders, including the executive team and investors.

Nice to Haves:

• Experience with data science/ML teams and integrating machine learning models into product features.
• Experience in scaled B2C environments.
• Strong understanding of mobile app development and performance optimization, especially in app-based ecosystems.
• Background in leading engineering teams through Series A/B startup journeys and navigating the 1 to 10 and 10 to 100 growth stages.

Expected Key Deliverables:

1. Feature Delivery Index: Measure the efficiency and timeliness of feature releases, including the impact on user engagement and retention.
2. System Performance and Availability: Ensure the app maintains 99.9% uptime, with strong app performance at scale.
3. ANR and Crash Free Rate - Ensure the app maintains < 0.1% ANR and 99.9% crash free rate
4. Response Time - Ensure top 20 APIs have a average response time < 100 ms
5. Code coverage - Ensure >90% code coverage with automated test cases for backend and frontend
6. Security Incident Response: Drive a proactive security strategy with a low number of security incidents and high compliance.
7. Cost per MAU: Maintain cost-efficient infrastructure while scaling effectively to support growing user traffic.
8. Team Growth and Retention: Build and retain a high-performing engineering team, with a strong focus on culture and collaboration.
9. Tech Debt Reduction: Proactively manage and reduce technical debt while delivering new features.

What we have to offer 🙌:

1. Our salaries are competitive. Given the senior leadership role, we’re very open to discussing ESOPs - but expectation is also high given the fast paced environment of a startup that is trying to find a scalable business model.
2. We are based out of Delhi, and this role is also based out of Delhi. #LI-Onsite 
3. Meritocracy-driven, candid & diverse culture.

Working @ Hunch

We are a $23m Series A funded startup being steered by 3 founders - Ish Goel, Nitika Goel, Kartic Rakhra. Ish has been a 3x entrepreneur. He also served as the founding CTO of Nexus Mutual from 2017-2020 and got his exit at a 100x multiple. He then moved on to build PlotX in Mar 2020, which eventually pivoted to Hunch - now scaling in the US and India as a social dating app. We are a total of 70 people.  

Hunch links

• join.hunch.in/try
• Hunch Insta

Apply:

If you are passionate about technology, love solving complex problems, and want to be part of a high-growth startup, we would love to hear from you!