Tech Lead / Architect

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).

• 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
  

• 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)
  

• 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
  

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
  

• 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