Chief Technology Officer

Founding CTO

Saraathi AI Private Limited | India (Remote-friendly) | Founding Team

About Saraathi

Everyone needs someone to talk to yet millions of Indians have no one they can open up to without judgment. Saraathi.ai is an anonymous, AI-matched peer-support platform for emotional wellness, built for India . We connect people going through life's everyday challenges — work stress, relationships, exam pressure, big life transitions with trained peer listeners who've lived through the same, in their own language.

We are an early-stage, incorporated startup with our product design and frontend complete (live at saraathi.ai), a Startup India Seed Fund application in advanced review, and a focused 6-month roadmap to our first users and revenue.

The Role

We're looking for a Founding CTO to own everything technical, from architecture to launch to scale. The backend is greenfield — you choose the stack, set the engineering culture, and build the systems that make anonymous peer support safe, multilingual, and genuinely helpful. You'll work directly with the founder as a true partner: product and growth on one side, technology on the other.

This is a founding-team position with meaningful equity, and full ownership of the technical vision.

What You'll Own

• Platform architecture & backend — design and build the core platform end-to-end: APIs, data model, real-time chat infrastructure, deployment, and observability
• AI matching engine — the listener–seeker matching system that pairs people by language, life context, and emotional need
• Trust & safety systems — anonymity by design, content moderation, and reliable escalation pathways for conversations that need more than a peer; this is the most important system in the product
• Multilingual experience — support across 11 Indian languages, including Hinglish and code-mixed conversation
• Scale & cost discipline — take us from prototype to our first 10,000 users on a lean, grant-funded budget
• Team building — hire and lead the first engineers as we grow

What We're Looking For

• 6+ years of software engineering experience, including shipping at least one 0→1 product end-to-end (startup, founding-engineer, or side-project-to-production experience all count)
• Strong full-stack capability — comfortable owning backend, infrastructure, and working with a finished frontend
• Hands-on experience with LLMs / NLP in production: matching or recommendation systems, content moderation, conversational AI, or multilingual models
• A safety-first mindset — you treat user privacy, anonymity, and crisis escalation as core product features, not afterthoughts
• Comfort with early-stage reality: ambiguity, wearing many hats, equity-weighted compensation, and high ownership
• Strong product judgment — you can talk to users, challenge the founder, and make build-vs-buy calls independently

Nice to Have

• Experience building for Indian-language or Bharat-first users
• Background in consumer social, communities, marketplaces, or real-time chat products
• Prior founding or early-employee experience at a venture- or grant-funded startup
• A personal connection to why a platform like this should exist

How to Apply

Don't lead with a resume. Write to [email protected] with your why — the core reason you want to help build this — plus a link to something you've built. We'll take it from there.

Saraathi.ai is an equal-opportunity company. We especially welcome applicants from diverse linguistic and regional backgrounds across India.