Lead Engineer /Technical Architect

About Alphanext

Alphanext Technology Solutions is a technology-first global talent partner and product engineering company, helping organisations build scalable technology solutions and deploy highly skilled professionals across domains such as AI, Data Engineering, Cloud, Embedded Systems, and Enterprise Platforms.

With headquarters in London and operational presence across India, Alphanext enables global organizations to hire, build, and scale technology teams faster and more efficiently.

Role Overview

The Lead Engineer is the technical counterpart to the Founder: the person who owns how we build, keeps every product secure and robust, grows our engineering team, and stands alongside the Founder in front of customers. You will have real authority over architecture and engineering practice, and you will stay hands-on in the code

Primary Roles & Responsibilities

1. Hands-on technical leadership across all projects

• Own the architecture of Alphanext's internal products and external client projects, from first design to production.

• Stay hands-on: write and review production code, build proofs of concept, and resolve the hardest technical problems yourself.

• Set and enforce engineering standards: code review, branching and release, testing, observability and documentation (including architecture decision records).

• Design and integrate AI capabilities (LLMs, retrieval-augmented generation, embeddings,agents) safely and cost-effectively into our products.

2. Technical layouts and proposals

• Partner with the Founder to build technical layouts, solution architectures and proposals for prospects and clients.

• Translate business requirements into architecture, effort estimates, delivery plans and risk registers that the team can actually deliver.

• Represent technical feasibility honestly, so that what we sell is what we can build.

3. Team handholding and mentoring

• Lead and manage SDE I and SDE II engineers: plan their work, review their code, and unblock them quickly when they are stuck.

• Bring industry best practices to every problem so the team learns to solve similar problems on its own next time.

• Run regular 1:1s, set growth goals, and contribute to hiring, onboarding and performance reviews.

4 Security, encryption and periodic audits

• Make security a default, not an afterthought: secure design reviews, threat modelling, secrets management, least-privilege access and dependency hygiene.

• Own encryption strategy: TLS everywhere, encryption at rest, per-tenant key management (for example envelope encryption with a cloud KMS), key rotation and secure handling of PII.

• Periodically audit code repositories, deployments, access and audit logs, and report findings to the Founder on data security and encryption, with clear severity, owners and deadlines.

• Ensure multi-tenant data isolation and tamper-evident audit trails across our SaaS products; lead incident response when something goes wrong.

• Keep us aligned with relevant standards and customer expectations (for example OWASPTop 10, OWASP LLM Top 10, ISO 27001 and SOC 2 controls, and India's DPDP Act / GDPR where applicable).

5. Agile delivery

• Ensure every Alphanext project follows a disciplined Agile methodology: backlog grooming, sprint planning, stand-ups, reviews and retrospectives.

• Track delivery health (velocity, commitment vs delivery, defect rates) and act early when a project drifts.

• Balance speed with quality so that we can ship MVPs fast without accumulating unmanaged technical debt.

6. Customer-facing communication

• Join the Founder in customer meetings, discovery workshops and technical deep-dives with CIOs, CTOs and their teams.

• Explain complex architecture and security choices clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences, in writing and in person.

• Handle technical escalations calmly and own the follow-through

Mandatory Technical Skills

• 7 years or more professional software engineering, with at least 3 years as a tech lead,architect or engineering manager.

• Deep, hands-on expertise in at least one of our core stacks: Python (FastAPI/Django) or Node.js (Express/NestJS), plus React.js on the front end.

• Strong system design: distributed systems, multi-tenant SaaS, relational and NoSQL databases (PostgreSQL, Redis), message queues (RabbitMQ/Kafka), caching, idempotency, consistency and failure handling.

• Strong application security and cryptography fundamentals: authentication and authorisation(OAuth 2.0, OIDC, JWT pitfalls), password hashing, symmetric vs asymmetric encryption,AES-GCM, key management and rotation, TLS, secrets management and secure SDLC.

• Experience integrating AI into production systems: LLM APIs, RAG pipelines, vector databases, evaluation, cost control, and defences against prompt injection and data leakage.

• Cloud and DevOps experience (AWS, Azure or GCP; Docker; CI/CD; infrastructure as code observability with logs, metrics and traces).

• Proven track record running Agile teams and delivering projects predictably.

• Excellent written and spoken English; comfortable presenting to senior customer
  

• What we Offer .

• A strategic leadership role working directly with the Founder, with real ownership of how Alphanext builds software.

• Exposure to enterprise customers and decision makers across geographies.

• Hands-on work at the frontier of applied AI in production systems.

• Competitive compensation, aligned with experience and impact.

Good to Have

• Security certifications or equivalent experience (for example OSCP, CISSP, CSSLP, or cloud

security specialties).

• Experience preparing a company for ISO 27001 or SOC 2 audits.

• Experience in a services or consulting company, writing proposals and estimates.

• Experience with HR tech, logistics, fintech or enterprise SaaS domains.

Mandatory Technical Skills

• Python (FastAPI/Django) or Node.js (Express/NestJS), plus React.js.

• Relational and NoSQL databases (PostgreSQL, Redis)

• LLM APIs, RAG pipelines, vector databases, evaluation, cost control,

• (AWS, Azure or GCP; Docker; CI/CD; infrastructure as code observability with logs, metrics and traces