Director of Engineering, Backend and Product Engineering

About the Job: We're hiring a Director of Engineering to own the backend and internal platform layer between Redesign’s infrastructure and its applied AI products. This is the technology that makes our data, tools, and development patterns usable by engineers, agents, and the domain experts building software across the firm. What You'll Do: At Redesign, everyone builds. Experienced engineers ship more complexity than ever before, domain experts turn judgment into working systems, and agents participate in the path from idea to production. That changes what backend engineering means. The backend is the shared layer of data, access, tools, and conventions that lets many kinds of builders create safely. This role owns that layer between infrastructure and applied AI. Build the backend platform behind Redesign’s operating system. You will own the APIs, databases, services, resource models, migrations, and access patterns that back our core AI operating system. Your job is to make the primitives behind Redesign’s work easy to discover, safe to extend, and hard to misuse, so applications, agents, and builders can consume trusted data without bespoke plumbing. Define the paradigm for AI-native development. You will own the systems and conventions that let agents drive software engineering: agentic coding patterns, harness design, memory management, verification loops, and self-learning multi-agent code review. Done well, this unlocks a trusted path from intent to production: if generated code is safe, standards-compliant, and proven to do what it was meant to do, it can become part of the system without turning human review into a bottleneck. Build for a workforce where everyone creates software. You will own the developer experience for a builder population that brings together infrastructure engineers, applied AI engineers, and domain experts without formal software backgrounds. You will deeply understand how Redesign functions and build powerful primitives that cut across teams, decisions, and geographies. That means thoughtfully designed tools and interfaces that capture the most important work and workflows, and let the whole firm turn judgment into technology at the speed of thought. What You'll Need: We value and actively seek exceptional talent from all backgrounds and experiences, recognizing that excellence takes many forms. The strongest candidates have been selected into high-talent environments, distinguished themselves within them, earned unusually broad scope or trusted ownership, progressed rapidly, or done work that changed the trajectory of a team, product, company, or field. While every path is different, we believe the most successful candidates for this role will share the following characteristics: 10-12+ years of engineering experience, with meaningful time at staff, principal, or equivalent level at a serious software company. You have anchored the technical work of a small, fast team before, and you have owned backend, data, developer-platform, or internal-platform systems that other people built on every day. You have shipped production backend systems in Python and/or TypeScript, with ownership of database schemas, migrations, API contracts, authentication, and permissions. You have worked deeply with Postgres or a similar relational database; built authorization or identity layers with scoped access for users, services, and agents; and shipped APIs and data services that multiple teams depended on. You have built or operated agent-facing infrastructure that teams used every day: MCP servers and tools, Claude Code or Cursor conventions, skills or plugin systems, sandboxed execution, code-review automation, evals, usage and cost controls, and safe defaults. You understand that agents are now first-class consumers of backend systems. You have range across product craft and developer experience. You have built tools, applications, or internal platforms for experienced engineers and for builders without traditional software backgrounds, and you understand that this work is as much about shaping how people encounter the system as it is about creating a technical surface. You have thought deeply about how different kinds of builders climb the AI curve, where they get stuck, and what a great first experience should feel like. You are AI-native. LLMs and agents have rewired how you build. You are proficient with modern agent frameworks (the Anthropic Agent SDK, Lang* / Deep Agents, or similar) and have shipped production systems on top of them. You have built sophisticated systems on top of coding agents like Claude Code (skills, MCPs, custom harnesses) and have hardly written code by hand in over a year. Technology is one of your passions, and you find deep meaning in some other pursuit to which you've devoted your time, thought, and effort: a creative or athletic outlet, a family business, or service. Strong plus: track record as a founder, founding engineer, or 0-to-1 product engineering owner inside a small, fast team. Bonus: a quantitative degree (or a few) from a strong program; open-source contributions; published work; or a side project other people have actually used. Who You Are: A true builder who is always tinkering, experimenting, and looking for the better way. Where others see one-off app requests, you see the workflows, access patterns, and primitives that could make the next ten requests easier. Proud of platform craft. You believe the difference between systems people build on and systems people work around is the quality of the design, and the technical and business judgment behind it. A clear writer who believes English is the most important programming language. Your API docs, migration notes, examples, agent instructions, and tool descriptions make the right path obvious to humans and agents. Allergic to repeating yourself. If you see the same workaround twice, the third answer is a shared service, MCP tool, template, or platform capability. Deeply curious about the business, not just the technology. You can read a deal memo, a fundraising deck, and a research note and create great data models, APIs, and tools around them. You design for agents as first-class users. You think about tools, context, permissions, evals, memory, and failure recovery as product surfaces. You have thrived in a group of passionate, talented, diverse, and low-ego individuals because these kinds of people love working with you. You have accomplished something most people haven't: started a company, won an international academic award, shipped a product loved by many, performed music around the world, or overcome difficult circumstances to succeed. You have dedicated your life to excellence in your craft. Compensation and Location: You will work out of our Bengaluru office on a hybrid schedule, with strong overlap into US Eastern and Pacific hours. We target world-class talent and compensate accordingly, with packages containing a mix of cash and fund equity. #J-18808-Ljbffr