Head of Product Development - Chennai - Ailaysa

Description

About Ailaysa

Ailaysa Technologies Pvt Ltd is an AI-powered multilingual content creation and translation platform headquartered in Chennai. Our enterprise group clients include Fortune 500 companies, and we serve publishers, enterprises, and government institutions across India, the US, EU and Asia.

Our product portfolio includes Ailaysa SaaS (AI content & translation workflows), and Chai Reader (AI-powered book discovery and eCommerce). We are at a high-growth inflection point and are building the engineering leadership team to match our ambitions.

The Opportunity

We are looking for a technically credible, delivery-obsessed Engineering Leader who can own the end-to-end development and release of our SaaS products. This is not a hands-on coding role — it is a people multiplication and product delivery role. You will lead a cross-functional team spanning Backend, Frontend/UI, AI/ML, QA/Testing, and Cloud/DevOps, and you will be accountable for shipping quality products on time, every time.

The ideal candidate is someone who was once a strong engineer but has grown past it.

What You Will OwnProduct Delivery

•     Own the end-to-end delivery of all AI SaaS product releases — from technical planning to production deployment

•     Translate product roadmaps and business priorities into engineering milestones with clear timelines

•     Identify cross-team dependencies, surface blockers early, and resolve them before they become delays

•     Make intelligent scope trade-off decisions: what ships, what gets deferred, and what becomes technical debt

•     Maintain release cadence discipline across multiple parallel workstreams

Team Leadership

•     Lead and manage a team of 8–15 engineers across Backend, Frontend/UI, AI/ML, QA/Testing, and Cloud/DevOps

•     Create high-trust, high-accountability team culture where engineers surface problems early and own their outcomes

•     Run effective sprint planning, retrospectives, and 1:1s that improve team performance over time

•     Mentor and develop engineers at all levels — grow junior members while retaining and challenging senior ones

•     Make or support hiring decisions; contribute to building the engineering org as Ailaysa scales

Technical Oversight

•     Review architecture decisions, technical designs, and infrastructure proposals — challenge risks, not just accept them

•     Set and enforce engineering standards: code quality, security, documentation, and testing coverage

•     Oversee cloud infrastructure and DevOps practices to ensure reliability, scalability, and cost-efficiency

•     Ensure AI/ML components are integrated responsibly, with clear performance benchmarks and fallback mechanisms

•     Own the incident response process and post-mortems for production issues

Stakeholder Communication

•     Serve as the primary interface between engineering and business/product leadership

•     Translate technical complexity into business language without distortion — in both directions

•     Report on sprint velocity, delivery risk, and engineering health to the CEO and leadership team

•     Collaborate closely with product and business leads across divisions on technical delivery priorities

What We Are Looking For

Must-Have Experience

•     6–10 years in software engineering with at least 2 years in a team lead or engineering head role

•     Proven track record of shipping SaaS products on time with a cross-functional team

•     Experience leading teams that include Backend, Frontend, QA, and DevOps disciplines

•     Hands-on background in Python/Django 

•     Strong understanding of cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, or Azure)

•     Experience with Agile/Scrum delivery methodology

Strong Advantage

•     Experience leading AI/ML engineering teams or integrating LLM-based features into SaaS products

•     Familiarity with multilingual content platforms, NLP, or translation technology

•     Experience in AI, publishing technology, edtech SaaS, or content platform engineering is a PLUS

•     Prior work with multi-tenant SaaS architecture and enterprise-grade security/compliance (GDPR, EU AI Act)

•     Startup or scale-up experience where you built processes from the ground up

Leadership Competencies We Are Hiring For

This role requires a leader who combines technical judgment, delivery discipline, and the ability to scale team performance. Before applying, candidates should reflect on the following competencies:

Technical Credibility

You are comfortable engaging in architectural discussions, reviewing engineering estimates, and evaluating technical trade-offs. You understand what "production-ready" means across backend, frontend, AI/ML, infrastructure, and QA.

Delivery Discipline

You are highly execution-focused. You proactively track dependencies, anticipate risks, and make pragmatic scope decisions to ensure consistent, on-time product releases.

Team Multiplication

You elevate the performance of the team through clear ownership, high accountability, and a culture where issues surface early. You actively mentor engineers and address performance issues directly when required.

Stakeholder Communication

You communicate effectively across technical and business teams. You can translate engineering complexity into clear business implications and provide leadership with transparent updates on delivery progress and risks.

Startup Execution Mindset

You are comfortable building processes in a fast-moving environment. You move quickly, make pragmatic decisions, and treat constraints as problems to solve rather than blockers.

What This Role Is Not

To avoid misalignment, this role is not suited for the following profiles:

• A project manager with a technical title. This role requires real engineering depth and accountability for product delivery.
• A senior developer primarily focused on coding. The core responsibility is leading people and driving execution, not individual development work.
• A strategist without execution discipline. Vision must be matched with the ability to manage delivery in detail.
• A leader who avoids difficult conversations. Addressing delivery risks, missed commitments, and performance issues directly is part of the role.

 What We Offer

The Role

•     Direct reporting line to the Founder & CEO

•     Full ownership of engineering delivery across an AI-first product portfolio

•     Opportunity to build the engineering org from an early stage

•     Exposure to AI, and language technology markets

•     Work with enterprise and government clients

The Environment

•     Competitive compensation benchmarked to market (details on discussion)

•     Fast-growth startup with global offices in US and EU.

•     A founder with 25+ years in language technology who invests in the team, and leader in AI, as Ailaysa was started 3 years before ChatGPT released

How to Apply

Send your CV and a short note (not more than 200 words) on the most complex multi-disciplinary engineering team you have led and what you learned from it to:

  |   Subject: Head of Product Development

We review applications on a rolling basis. Shortlisted candidates will be contacted within 7 working days. The selection process includes a technical discussion, a leadership case interview, and a final conversation with the CEO.