Founding Product & Platform Engineer

Qeelo | Remote — India | Paid Contract
Qeelo is building Personal Execution Intelligence.
Most productivity software helps people manage tasks. Qeelo is being built to understand a person's goals, commitments, time, context, capacity and current state—and determine what should happen next, when it should happen, and help execute it.
We are looking for a Founding Product & Platform Engineer in India to join us at the earliest stage of building Qeelo.
This is a paid contract position with the opportunity to transition into a longer-term founding engineering role as Qeelo and the broader Nehemaya platform grow.
What you'll do
You will work directly with the founder and take significant ownership of the technical foundation of Qeelo.
Your responsibilities will include:
Architect and build Qeelo from 0→1, turning product concepts into working software.
Design and develop scalable backend services, APIs and core application infrastructure.
Build the data architecture underlying users, goals, commitments, context, execution state and activity.
Develop intelligent product capabilities using AI/LLMs, agents and contextual reasoning.
Build integrations with calendars, communication tools and other sources of user context over time.
Design authentication, authorization, permissions and secure multi-tenant architecture.
Build real-time and event-driven systems where required.
Establish reliable development, testing, deployment and cloud infrastructure.
Make pragmatic architectural decisions appropriate for an early-stage product rather than over-engineering.
Work closely with the founder on product decisions and translate ambiguous ideas into technical systems.
Own features end-to-end—from architecture and implementation to deployment, monitoring and iteration.
Help establish the engineering practices and technical culture that will eventually support the wider Nehemaya platform.
What we're looking for
We're looking for an engineer who can build, not someone who only manages infrastructure.
You should have:
5+ years of professional software engineering experience preferred.
Strong experience building and shipping production software.
Demonstrated experience taking products or major features from 0→1.
Strong backend engineering and system-design capabilities.
Excellent knowledge of TypeScript/Node.js and/or Python.
Strong experience with PostgreSQL and modern data architectures.
Experience with React/Next.js or comparable modern frontend technologies.
Experience designing APIs, distributed systems and event-driven architectures.
Experience with cloud infrastructure, preferably AWS.
Working knowledge of Docker, CI/CD and infrastructure-as-code.
Experience integrating LLMs, AI APIs, AI agents or intelligent application features is highly valuable.
Strong understanding of authentication, authorization, security and scalable application architecture.
Ability to work independently with incomplete requirements and make sound technical decisions.
Strong communication skills and the ability to work directly with a non-technical founder/product leader.
You will be especially strong if you have
Previously been a Founding Engineer, First Engineer, Early Engineer, Staff Engineer or Lead Engineer at a startup.
Built a product from a blank repository to production.
Worked at an early-stage SaaS or AI company.
Built products involving AI agents, contextual intelligence or automation.
Experience with real-time systems, WebSockets, queues, event-driven architecture or distributed systems.
Experience building products that have scaled to meaningful numbers of users.
A product mindset—you care about what we're building and why, not just how it is technically implemented.
What this role is NOT
This is not primarily a DevOps/SRE role.
We value cloud infrastructure, Kubernetes, Terraform, CI/CD and reliability—but those are supporting capabilities.
The primary responsibility is:
Take product ideas, turn them into architecture, write the software, ship it, learn from users and continuously improve it.
You should be comfortable moving between product, backend, AI, platform and infrastructure as the product requires.
Why join Qeelo?
You'll be joining at the stage where your technical decisions can fundamentally shape the product.
You won't be joining a large engineering organization to maintain an existing system. You'll help establish the technical foundation, architecture and engineering culture from the beginning.
Engagement
Paid contract position
Location: India — Remote
Engagement: Initial contract with potential for longer-term founding engineering role
Start: As soon as possible
If you're excited by 0→1 product building, AI-native applications, systems architecture and working closely with a founder to build something from the ground up, we'd love to hear from you.
Apply with your LinkedIn profile/CV and a short note describing the most interesting product or system you have built from scratch.

Work arrangement
Yes