Founding Engineer

Founding Engineer
About Comply Ark
Comply Ark is a product company building regulatory infrastructure for data protection, starting with India's DPDPA. No client projects, no outsourced development, no staff augmentation. We build and own two products: DataLens, an enterprise platform for complying with the DPDPA, and CookieGate, a cookie and tracker consent platform for India and the major global privacy laws. The core architecture of DataLens is patent-pending. Comply Ark was founded by a former data protection lawyer and a software architect, and is incubated at ISB DLabs and IIIT Hyderabad.
The Product
Most privacy tools need access to the very data they are meant to protect. DataLens does not. It is deployed inside the customer's infrastructure, where it finds and classifies personal data across databases, file stores and employee devices, including documents in Indian languages, and only opaque identifiers and metadata ever reach our cloud. That is why banks, hospitals and other regulated enterprises can adopt it. The discovery engine is built and approaching its first release. You will build the layer that turns discovery into compliance: consent, individual rights requests, breach management, retention and audit.
How We Build
We work spec-first and build AI-first. Every feature starts as a specification: the requirement, the edge cases, the data it may and may not touch, and the tests that prove it works. AI coding assistants write most of the implementation. Engineers own everything around it: the specification, the review, the tests and the decision to ship.
Typing speed matters very little here. What matters is whether you can write a specification that cannot be misread, and whether you can look at code that compiles and passes its tests and still see that it is wrong.
What You Will Do
Turn product and legal requirements into precise technical specifications, working directly with the founders
Break specifications into well-scoped tasks, direct the AI tools that implement them, and review every change before it merges
Define what "correct" means for each feature before code is written, and own the tests that prove it
Build DataLens end to end, from the software that runs inside customer environments to our cloud application
Guard the data-blind boundary in every review, including the easy-to-miss paths such as logs, error payloads and telemetry
Support customer deployments and diagnose problems that only appear on real infrastructure
The Problems You Will Solve
Resolving one person across many systems using only opaque identifiers
Proving that an erasure request reached every copy of the data
Keeping consent records correct through change and withdrawal
Building audit trails that stand up to a regulator
Running software inside locked-down customer networks you cannot log in to
Keeping detection fast and accurate across millions of records
What We Are Looking For
4 to 7 years building production software, ideally in B2B, enterprise or security-sensitive settings
An AI-first way of working you can show us, including AI output you rejected and why
Strong systems fundamentals: relational databases, concurrency, networking and TLS, authentication and authorisation
Architecture for scale: you know how systems behave at millions and billions of records, and where they break first
The ability to read Go and TypeScript closely enough to catch a subtle bug or a race condition in code you did not write
Testing discipline and clear written English
Good to have: Go in production, PostgreSQL depth, on-premises or customer-hosted deployments, security engineering, and experience with NLP or locally hosted language models.
This role is not for you if you are a vibe coder shipping code you cannot fully explain, or if you would rather not work with AI coding tools at all.
Tech Environment
Go, PostgreSQL, SQLite, React, TypeScript. Spec-driven, AI-first development.
Work Setup
Full-time and mainly remote, with travel to our Kochi or Hyderabad office about once a month. You should be based within reasonable travel distance of either city. Employment begins with a three-month probation period. We strongly prefer candidates who can join within 30 days.
Why Join
This is product engineering, not project delivery. You will own parts of a product for years, work directly with both founders, and learn a regulatory domain that is still new to most engineering teams.
How to Apply
Apply here, or email your CV, current location, notice period and links to your work to midhun@complyark.com (cc careers@complyark.com) with the subject line "Founding Engineer - [Your Name]".
Comply Ark is an equal opportunity employer.

Work arrangement
Hybrid