Engineering Lead

1. About NetZhero

NetZhero is developing India's foremost ESG and carbon intelligence platform — an integrated, three-tier system comprising the ESG Compliance Suite, the Carbon Intelligence Module, and the Agri-Forestry Credit Generator. The platform translates complex regulatory frameworks — including the GHG Protocol, BRSR, TCFD, and Verra VCS — into structured, auditable software, enabling enterprises to measure, manage, and report on their sustainability obligations with precision and confidence.

NetZhero operates with a lean, high-ownership engineering team committed to technical rigour, long-term architectural thinking, and delivery discipline. The Engineering Lead is a central and defining role within this team.

2. Position Overview

NetZhero is seeking an experienced Engineering Lead to provide both technical leadership and direct, hands-on engineering contribution across the full lifecycle of the platform. This is a dual-function role: the successful candidate will be expected to contribute actively to feature development, architecture, and code delivery while simultaneously providing technical direction, mentorship, and engineering governance to the broader team.

This position is not a purely managerial appointment. NetZhero requires an Engineering Lead who leads by technical example — writing production-quality code on a regular basis, making and owning architectural decisions, and holding the team to a high standard of engineering craft. Candidates who seek to move away from active development are not suited to this role.

The Engineering Lead will work in close collaboration with Product, Architecture, and Business stakeholders to translate the platform's governance, materiality assessment, and Measurement, Reporting, and Verification (MRV) requirements into reliable, scalable, and well-structured software.

3. Key Responsibilities

3.1 Hands-On Engineering and Feature Development

• Contribute production-ready code across the full technology stack on a regular and sustained basis, functioning as a primary delivery contributor and not solely in a review or oversight capacity.
  
• Assume end-to-end technical ownership of significant features and modules across the ESG Compliance Suite, Carbon Intelligence Module, and Agri-Forestry Credit Generator — encompassing design, implementation, testing, and deployment.
  
• Design and implement data models, API contracts, and service boundaries that underpin the platform's ESG-pillar analytics engines, MRV workflows, and carbon credit calculation pipelines.
  
• Provide direct technical resolution when complex engineering challenges arise, actively engaging with the problem rather than escalating without contribution.
  

3.2 Architecture and Technical Direction

• Establish and document architectural decisions for the platform's cloud-native services, ensuring that scalability, security, service ownership, and long-term maintainability are addressed as the team grows.
  
• Apply appropriate design discipline for the regulatory environment in which the platform operates — with specific attention to auditability, data lineage, versioned calculation logic, and the production of structured outputs suitable for third-party verification.
  
• Evaluate open-source frameworks and third-party tooling systematically, favouring proven, well-supported components and contributing improvements upstream where appropriate.
  

3.3 Artificial Intelligence and Agentic Capabilities

• Lead the engineering design and delivery of the platform's agentic AI capabilities, developed using LangGraph, Ollama, and QLoRA fine-tuning workflows, in support of governance automation, double-materiality assessment, and MRV use cases.
  
• Integrate AI-assisted development tooling — including coding assistants and automated code review systems — into the team's standard development workflow to improve delivery velocity and early defect detection.
  
• Identify, evaluate, and implement AI and machine learning features that deliver predictive and decision-support intelligence to end users within the ESG and carbon intelligence modules.
  

3.4 DevOps, Reliability, and Cloud Infrastructure

• Design, implement, and maintain continuous integration and continuous deployment pipelines across all platform services, ensuring consistent, repeatable, and automated delivery.
  
• Own platform reliability, including uptime commitments, observability instrumentation, incident response protocols, and alerting configurations that enable proactive issue identification.
  
• Manage cloud infrastructure through Infrastructure as Code practices, maintaining cost-efficiency and appropriate environment sizing as platform usage and team scale increase.
  

3.5 Engineering Quality and Team Development

• Establish, communicate, and enforce code review standards, testing expectations, and coding conventions across the engineering team — functioning as an active reviewer and not merely as a standard-setter.
  
• Provide structured technical mentorship to engineers across full-stack, cloud, and AI-assisted development disciplines, treating the growth of team capability as a core professional responsibility.
  
• Define, monitor, and act on engineering quality indicators including test coverage rates, defect escape rates, and code review turnaround times, using these metrics to inform continuous process improvement.
  

3.6 Delivery Management and Stakeholder Communication

• Monitor and report on engineering delivery health using recognised metrics such as deployment frequency, lead time for changes, and change failure rate, ensuring delivery remains predictable and risks are surfaced early.
  
• Communicate technical progress, architectural trade-offs, and delivery status to product and business stakeholders in a clear, structured, and timely manner.
  
• Contribute to the growth and culture of a high-ownership engineering team, maintaining an appropriate balance between delivery speed and the engineering discipline required within a regulated compliance domain.
  

4. Required Qualifications

• Experience: A minimum of 8 years of professional software engineering experience, including at least 2 to 3 years in a technical lead or senior engineering lead role that involved active coding alongside team leadership and architectural responsibility.
  
• Continued Technical Contribution: Demonstrated commitment to ongoing, regular production coding in recent roles; candidates who have transitioned to exclusively managerial responsibilities are not eligible for this position.
  
• Full-Stack Proficiency: Substantive, hands-on expertise across the complete technology stack, including React and Next.js on the frontend and Node.js and Python on the backend, with the capability to work effectively at any layer without requiring specialist assistance.
  
• Cloud and DevOps Competency: Practical, proven experience with cloud platform operations, containerisation technologies, CI/CD pipeline management, and Infrastructure as Code; a demonstrated record of owning production reliability in a professional context.
  
• Applied AI and Agentic Systems: Demonstrated experience incorporating AI-assisted tools into software development workflows, with preferably direct exposure to building agentic or large language model-powered product features, including familiarity with frameworks such as LangGraph and fine-tuning approaches including LoRA or QLoRA.
  
• Engineering Quality Leadership: A verifiable track record of improving engineering quality standards within a team through active code review, structured mentorship, and the establishment of practices that endure beyond individual projects.
  
• Stakeholder Communication: The ability to communicate effectively and independently with product management, technical architecture, and business stakeholders, translating complex engineering considerations into clear, actionable information.
  

5. Preferred Qualifications

• Professional exposure to ESG, carbon accounting, or climate technology domains, including working knowledge of frameworks such as the GHG Protocol, BRSR, Verra VCS, or comparable standards.
  
• Experience designing and operating data-intensive platforms in which calculation accuracy, data lineage, and auditability are non-negotiable requirements.
  
• Contributions to open-source software projects or published technical writing that demonstrates depth of expertise and engagement with the engineering community.
  
• Familiarity with spatial or geospatial data systems with relevance to agri-forestry carbon sequestration analysis and land-use modelling.
  

6. Technical Environment

7. What NetZhero Offers

• The opportunity to engineer a platform of genuine societal significance — ESG and carbon intelligence infrastructure at a moment of substantial and growing regulatory and market demand.
  
• Significant technical autonomy and ownership from the outset, with direct influence over architectural decisions and platform direction.
  
• A professional engineering culture that prioritises code quality, peer review discipline, and the continuous development of team capability.
  
• Competitive total compensation commensurate with experience, a flexible hybrid working arrangement, and the prospect of professional growth within a company at a consequential stage of its development.