Tech Lead / Architect

Job Description This is a remote position. ZipNom Technologies is building two products that could each become companies in their own right, and we need one senior engineer to own the technical direction of both. Verizol — a company intelligence and verification platform: 45+ APIs (KYC/KYB, bank, face, CKYC, eSign) on top of a daily MCA data pipeline, with a prepaid credit wallet, webhooks, and watchlist monitoring. Think fintech infrastructure — Surepass/Signzy territory — with an 8-week build plan and a written engineering blueprint ready on day one. ZipNom Serve — a hardware-as-a-service restaurant operations platform: ESP32 table devices, a waiter app, and real-time request routing over MQTT, heading into a 90-day pilot with Hyderabad restaurants. This is a player-coach role. You will write code on the hardest parts personally (Verizol’s wallet/ledger core is yours, not delegated), review everything, and make the architecture calls across a 6–8 person engineering team. You report directly to the founder and act as the technical counterpart in vendor decisions (verification aggregators, eSign providers, hardware suppliers). What You Will Own Verizol The platform architecture: API gateway, credit wallet/ledger with idempotent charging, provider-adapter layer for 30+ passthrough verification endpoints, event pipeline powering alerts and watchlists Personally design and build the wallet/ledger core — reserve/commit/release semantics, concurrency safety, reconciliation API contracts as source of truth: own the OpenAPI spec that generates handlers, SDKs, docs, and tests Technical evaluation and integration strategy for verification aggregators and the eSign service provider The 8-week delivery plan: run weekly demos, hold the scope line, ship to production ZipNom Serve Architecture oversight of the FastAPI / MQTT / Flutter stack and ESP32 device fleet: provisioning, OTA updates, offline resilience in real restaurant network conditions Pilot engineering: instrument the 90-day Hyderabad pilot so product decisions come from device and usage data, not anecdotes Make the build-vs-simplify calls that keep a hardware product shippable (the v1 already cut smartwatches and UWB — you’ll defend that discipline) Across both Code review gate and engineering standards (trunk-based, ADRs, CI discipline) for the whole team Mentor 4–6 engineers; pairing rotations on the load-bearing components AWS infrastructure direction (ECS, RDS, Redis, SQS) with a shared DevOps engineer Requirements Must-have 6+ years building production backend systems, with 2+ years leading (formally or de facto) a team Hands-on experience shipping a payments, billing, ledger, or wallet system — able to explain double-charge prevention with idempotency keys and append-only ledgers Strong TypeScript/Node.js, or equivalent depth in Laravel/PHP with willingness to architect in either Solid SQL and PostgreSQL internals — locking, partitioning, safe migrations Third-party API integration at scale: timeouts, circuit breakers, response normalization, invoice reconciliation AWS production experience: ECS/Fargate (or equivalent), RDS, Redis, queues, IAM hygiene Clear written communication — specs, ADRs, PR reviews (both projects run on written culture) Strongly preferred Fintech / KYC / verification / lending-infrastructure background — familiarity with Aadhaar, PAN, penny-drop, or CKYC rails IoT or embedded-adjacent exposure: MQTT, device fleets, OTA updates (for ZipNom Serve), or at minimum genuine curiosity about hardware constraints Python comfort — the data pipeline and Serve backend are Python Experience acting as the technical counterpart in vendor negotiations Soft/behavioral (non-negotiable for this role) Player-coach mindset — writes the hardest code personally, doesn't just architect Comfortable working directly with a founder, no PM layer Scope discipline — able to say "no, that's Week 9" and hold the line Mentorship — can grow 4–6 engineers into a team that ships without them being the bottleneck Benefits Competitive salary benchmarked to senior/staff level in Hyderabad + meaningful ESOP in the product entities (this is a build-equity role, not a services role) Direct founder access, written-culture environment, and two products with a real shot — the JD you’re reading came from a 27-page engineering blueprint that already exists On-site in Hyderabad preferred, given the hardware component; hybrid negotiable after month 3