Founding CTO - AI Startup (Mumbai Only)

Company Description

Applied Retention is a Mumbai based AI startup building an innovative AI-powered customer intelligence and decisioning platform designed to revolutionize marketing as we know it. Our platform shifts the paradigm from traditional if/then journeys to dynamic, highly contextual 1:1 personalized customer experiences. We aim to empower businesses with cutting-edge AI/ML technology to foster deeper customer engagement and maximize marketing effectiveness. Join us in shaping the future of intelligent customer interactions.

Role Description

As founding CTO, you own the technical vision and the platform end to end: the systems that pull customer data out of warehouses, CRMs, and CEPs, the decisioning engine that picks the right offer, channel, and moment for every customer, and the layer that pushes those decisions back out for execution. You'll make the foundational calls, write the core of the product yourself, then build and lead the team behind it. This is a founder-level seat.

What you"ll own

Architect and build the core platform (data pipelines for ingestion, data transformation using AI/ML for intelligent decisioning, and marketing data delivery using APIs to marketing automation platforms.)
Make the foundational calls: architecture, stack, build vs. buy, what ships first.
Build the integrations that connect to customer warehouses, CRMs, and CEPs.
Own reliability, security, and scale as customers and data grow.
Hire and lead engineering
Partner with the founder on roadmap, product design and technical strategy

Required

6-10 years of experience shipping production grade software
Previously held Senior Backend / Data Engineering or Architect positions
Deep Expertise in Python,FASTAPI, PosegreSQL, Redis, and AWS
Deep systems and backend engineering: distributed systems, APIs, data pipelines, cloud infra.
Comfortable writing code and not just owning it
Enough ML and data fluency to architect a product whose core IP is decisioning models — you don't have to build the models, but you build everything around them.
Thrive in 0-to-1 ambiguity with full ownership.
Can hire senior engineers, lead a team, and set technical direction.

Preferred

Founding engineer or early technical leader who took a product from zero to scale.
Built martech, data infrastructure, or B2B SaaS that integrates with third-party systems via APIs.
In touch and fluent with using all new AI LLMs and Coding assistants

What you get

Founding CTO seat and the chance to build and own a category defining company from scratch
Direct influence over product, strategy, and where the company goes.
Competitive salary + Equity (standard 4+1 vesting/cliff)