Head of Engineering (Venture Operations)

Company Description

ANTLAB is a venture studio based in Coimbatore, founded by a seasoned technology entrepreneur.

We partner with aspiring founders to transform their ideas into market-ready MVPs and secure early-stage funding. This is your opportunity to actively shape the next generation of successful startups.

Based in Coimbatore, our mission is to build an ecosystem of successful tech startups. We are looking for a technology leader to be the architect of our venture-building engine.

This is not a role managing a single product; it's a role where you will build an entire portfolio of companies. As our Head of Engineering, you will be the technical force behind our studio, working across multiple ventures at different stages of their lifecycle.

You will act as the de facto founding CTO for our new ventures, rapidly building MVPs to validate ideas. You will create the technical playbook and reusable platforms that accelerate our speed to market. As ventures mature, you will help hire their permanent technical leaders and transition into an advisory role. This is a unique opportunity for an entrepreneurial technologist to build multiple products, mentor founders, and have a profound impact on the startup landscape.

Key Responsibilities

1. Venture Ideation & Technical Due Diligence:

• Collaborate with the partners to evaluate new venture concepts for technical feasibility, scalability, and risk.
• Define the initial technology strategy and architecture for promising new startup ideas.
• Conduct rapid, hands-on technical spikes and proofs-of-concept to de-risk core assumptions.

2. 0-to-1 Product Development:

• Lead the hands-on development of Minimum Viable Products (MVPs) for new ventures, writing clean, scalable code to get products into users' hands quickly.
• Select the appropriate technology stack for each new venture based on its specific needs and market context.
• Implement and manage a lean, agile development process optimized for speed, learning, and iteration.

3. Platform & Playbook Creation:

• Design and build a "startup-in-a-box" technical framework—a set of reusable code libraries, boilerplates, cloud infrastructure setups (IaC), and CI/CD pipelines to dramatically accelerate the launch of new ventures.
• Establish and enforce best practices for software engineering, security, and data management across the entire portfolio.

4. Team Building & Portfolio Leadership:

• Act as the interim technical leader for new ventures until a full-time CTO/Founding Engineer is hired.
• Play a key role in recruiting, interviewing, and selecting the founding technical talent for our portfolio companies.
• Mentor and coach the technical leads within the portfolio, helping them navigate challenges related to scaling, team building, and technology choices.

Required Skills & Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience

  in software engineering, with significant time spent in early-stage startup environments.

• Proven experience as a founder, founding engineer, or senior technical leader

  where you have built and launched products from scratch.

• Architectural mastery:

  Strong, platform-agnostic understanding of system design, microservices, APIs, and modern cloud-native principles.

• Polyglot mindset:

  Hands-on proficiency with multiple programming languages and frameworks (e.g., Node.js/TypeScript, Python, Go, React, etc.) and the wisdom to choose the right tool for the job.
• Deep experience with a major cloud provider (

  AWS, GCP, or Azure

  ), including serverless and containerization technologies (Docker, Kubernetes).
• Exceptional ability to switch context quickly and manage multiple parallel projects without losing momentum.
• A strategic mindset, able to balance short-term execution with long-term technical vision.

Preferred Qualifications

• Direct experience working with startups.
• A portfolio of personal projects, an active GitHub profile, or contributions to open-source software.
• Experience across different business models (e.g., B2B SaaS, B2C, Marketplace).

What We Offer

• Unparalleled Impact:

  Build not one, but a portfolio of companies. This is a "Founder-at-Scale" opportunity.

• Significant Equity Exposure:

  A competitive salary plus meaningful equity participation (carry) across our entire portfolio of ventures, providing immense upside potential.

• Strategic Ownership:

  Sit at the core of our venture creation process, influencing which companies we build and how we build them.

• A-Player Team:

  Work alongside experienced entrepreneurs, investors, and operators.

How to Apply

If you are a builder at heart and are driven by the challenge of creating new businesses, we want to talk to you.

Please send your resume and a link to your LinkedIn or GitHub profile to vellayan@antlab.io.