Engineering
/Senior leadership
Principal Engineer — Platform
Architecture & Cross-cutting
Compensation
INR 60 - 90 LPA + equity.
Engagement
Full-Time
Permanent role. Full-time commitment. Primarily on-site, with limited remote flexibility.
Scope of role
Set direction within your domain. Build and mentor a team. Own outcomes at the function level.
01 — The role
Why this role exists at EduRankAI
The most senior individual contributor at the company. Not a manager. You set technical direction across teams without owning headcount, and the architecture documents you author are the ones other engineers will reference for years. The point of this role is to be the engineer that other senior engineers trust to think hard about something nobody has time for. You will spend a third of your time deep in the hardest production failures, a third writing the RFCs that bind multiple teams, and a third mentoring Staff-tier ICs into Principal candidates.
02 — The work
What you will own
- 01 Set cross-cutting technical direction across product, platform, and AI.
- 02 Author architecture RFCs that bind multiple teams for 12-24 month horizons.
- 03 Mentor Staff and Senior engineers; bring at least one Staff engineer to Principal-ready over 24 months.
- 04 Dive into the hardest production failures and fix them at root, then write the institutional learning.
- 05 Own one or two cross-cutting systems end-to-end (deploy infra, observability stack, secrets, etc.).
- 06 Be the second pair of eyes on every org-wide technical decision the CTO makes.
03 — The expertise
What we look for
04 — The bar
Who thrives here
- → You have been the senior-most IC at a company or org for at least 2 years.
- → You have authored an architecture document that bound multiple teams and survived contact with reality for at least 12 months.
- → You can describe an outage you root-caused that nobody else on your team could have.
- → You write internal essays without being asked to.
- → You have publicly disagreed with senior leadership in writing at least once, professionally, and survived it.
05 — Hiring process
What to expect after you apply
- 01
Application review
Every application is read personally within five business days. We respond either way.
- 02
Take-home or live exercise
Role-specific. Time-boxed. Real problems we are actually working on, not invented puzzles.
- 03
Conversations
Deep technical and values conversations with the team you would join. No trick questions. No panel ambushes.
- 04
Offer or honest no
If yes: digital offer letter, signed in-portal, transparent terms. If no: written feedback if you want it.
Before you start
What we will collect. What it costs. What we will not do with it.
We will collect
- Name, email, phone — Account + application updates. No marketing.
- Resume / portfolio link — Human review of your work.
- Date + place of birth — Identity verification only.
- Your written responses — Selection rubric. Read by humans.
- Government ID (later) — Anti-fraud at offer / interview stage. Not at signup.
We will never
- Sell your data
- Share with third-party recruiters
- Use for advertising
- Train models on it
- Send marketing email
Our situation
EduRankAI is a small, independent organization building long-term capabilities in educational intelligence, advanced AI systems, and research infrastructure. We take no advertiser money, no donations with strings attached, and no investor pressure on hiring decisions. Applying is free, and every application is read by a human — recruitment, technical, academic and leadership teams. It buys us the right to be honest.
Ready to apply?
We read every application personally. If you are the right person for this role — regardless of pedigree, background, or where you are based — you will hear back from us within five business days.
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