The posting
Location: Bengaluru,Karnataka,India
Engineering Lead (EL3)
About Whatfix
Whatfix is an AI platform that makes enterprise software, and now enterprise AI, usable for the people who depend on it. We call this userization: technology should adapt to the user, not the other way round.
Our proprietary AI engine, ScreenSense, reads what a user is doing inside an application and the intent behind it. It then delivers guidance, knowledge and automation in the flow of work. ScreenSense powers Digital Adoption, Product Analytics and Mirror, with Whatfix AI Agents built into each. Our newer AI-first products include Seek, an AI-native assistant that understands business context and acts across applications, and Mirror 2.0, which pairs system and role simulation with assessment.
- 700+ enterprise customers, including 80+ of the Fortune 500, such as Shell, Schneider Electric and UPS Supply Chain Solutions
- ~$270M raised, including a $125M Series E led by Warburg Pincus with SoftBank Vision Fund 2
- Named a Leader in Digital Adoption Platforms by Gartner, Forrester, IDC and Everest Group, and a Gartner Customers' Choice for DAP in 2024 and 2025
- Seven offices across the US, India, UK, Germany, Singapore and Australia
The role
This is a leadership role for someone who still builds.
Engineering at Whatfix has changed how it works. Every engineer takes a problem from spec to production, with coding agents doing much of the implementation. People own the judgment: what to build, how it should work, and whether what the agent produced is actually right.
As an Engineering Lead (EL3), you own engineering for a product or platform area end to end. You lead a team of around 7-10 engineers and shape the human + agent system they work in. You stay close enough to the code to make, and challenge, the important technical calls. And you still ship.
What you'll own
- Your area, end to end. Delivery, architecture, reliability, production health, and infrastructure and AI cost for a product or platform area.
- The technical bar. Important design decisions in your area come from you or go through you. You take architecture choices to our Architecture Review Board (ARB) and guide other teams that touch your code.
- Production quality. Work goes live with a spec, automated tests, monitoring and runbooks. Production issues get root-cause fixes and systemic improvements, not patches.
- Customer impact. You stay on top of customer issues, keep customers unblocked, and make sure Presales, Solutions and Support can confidently represent what your area does.
- The roadmap, with Product. You bring a clear technical and customer point of view, plan sprints, run spikes to retire risk early, and balance new work against tech debt and stability.
How your team builds
You don't just encourage AI adoption. You build the system that makes delegating to agents reliable.
- Spec-first by default. Every meaningful change starts with a written spec: the problem, expected outcome, constraints and acceptance criteria.
- The right context and guardrails. Repository context and instruction files, shared specs and prompts, tooling and review workflows that let engineers hand substantial work to coding agents with confidence.
- A Definition of Done that holds up with agents in the loop. Spec in the repo, tests before delegation, human review of agent-generated code, context files kept current.
- Engineers who verify, not just generate. You coach the team to write executable specs, delegate well, and critically review what comes back. Nothing ships because it compiles or passes its own generated tests.
- Clear accountability. Every engineer owns what they merge, whether a person or an agent wrote it.
- Safe use of AI. Approved tools only, with security, privacy, data and licensing requirements intact.
You still build
We mean this literally. With coding agents, there's no longer a trade-off between leading a team and shipping product.
- You take real problems from spec to production, using coding agents.
- You review specs, designs and agent-generated code closely enough to catch the race condition, the missing index or the weak assumption.
- You debug production issues hands-on and can explain, change and fix any system your team owns.
- You prototype and run spikes on the hardest technical questions before the team commits to an approach.
Leading the team
- Manage around 7-12 engineers directly, and over time possibly a further team through another Engineering Lead.
- Own performance end to end: expectations, ongoing feedback, reviews, compensation inputs, promotions, and managing underperformance, with support from HR.
- Give clear, direct feedback all the time, not just at review time.
- Build a team that can run several large initiatives in parallel, without you as the bottleneck and with no single points of failure.
- Hire for Engineering, not just your team. Raise the bar in interviews and help close strong senior talent.
- Build a culture of trust and ownership, where good work gets recognized publicly and in real time.
What success looks like
- First 90 days: You know your area's architecture, production health and cost. You've shipped real work yourself through the team's agent workflow. Every engineer knows exactly what you expect from them.
- By 6 months: Specs, the Definition of Done and agent guardrails are followed consistently, not just on paper. Customer issues are under control. Product and customer-facing teams come to you first for your area.
- By 12 months: Your team owns several large features at once without leaning on you. You can show measurable gains in cycle time, rework or escaped defects that come from better specs and delegation, not longer hours. At least one engineer has grown into a bigger scope.
What you bring
- Usually 8-15 years in software engineering, including time managing engineers directly. What you've owned matters more to us than the number.
- Strong engineering judgment in system design and distributed systems, including performance, scalability, fault tolerance and high availability.
- Full-stack fluency. Our services are mostly Java and Spring Boot, our frontends TypeScript and React, running on Docker, Kubernetes and cloud-native CI/CD with relational and NoSQL stores. We don't hire by stack boundary. You work across it.
- Real experience with coding agents such as Claude Code, Cursor or Copilot on meaningful work. You've delegated substantial work, seen where agents go wrong, and changed how you scope and verify as a result.
- A track record of leading teams that ship production-quality software, and of growing engineers who now own complex systems.
- Customer-first thinking. You tie technical decisions to business outcomes.
- Clear, structured communication. You can explain a hard trade-off to an engineer, a product manager or a customer.
- Good to have: experience building AI features into products, such as LLM integration, retrieval, agents or evaluation harnesses.
This may not be the right role if
- Your current role is mostly reviews, planning and people management, and you don't miss building.
- You see coding agents as a productivity add-on rather than a change in how engineering gets done.
- You'd rather own one layer of the stack than a whole problem.
How we'll assess you
Our interviews look like the job. You'll use a coding agent of your choice wherever it fits.
- Discovery conversation with a peer or our Head of Engineering
- Problem solving with a coding agent: build something that works, adapt it when a new constraint lands, explain what the agent produced, and review AI-generated code critically.
- System design and review: work through a larger problem end to end, then critique an existing design or code.
- Leadership conversation: how you've built and run teams, including a real example of meaningful work you handed to an agent, the context you gave it, and what you caught in review.
Rounds are in person at our Bengaluru office.
Working at Whatfix
How we work. We believe being together in the office 4-5 days a week makes communication easier, builds community and speeds up innovation.
Benefits (India). Best-in-class medical insurance, lunch and dinner buffet, doorstep cab drop, education sponsorship, internal and global mobility programs, and the chance to represent Whatfix at global events.
Our values. Customer First · Empathy · Transparency · Fail Fast and Scale Fast · No Hierarchies for Communication · Deep Dive and Innovate · Trust, Do It as You Own It.
We are an equal opportunity employer and value diverse people because of, not in spite of, their differences. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status or disability status.
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