Engineering Manager

Company Description Swades AI is India’s first dedicated AI R&D lab, focused on advancing foundational research in artificial intelligence, large language models, and computer vision. The organization turns cutting-edge research into practical, scalable solutions that can be deployed across industries. Its mission is to drive the AI revolution in India by making AI accessible, useful, and beneficial for diverse communities and businesses. Team members at Swades AI collaborate on high-impact projects that shape the future of AI technology and its real-world applications. Role Description As we scale our R&D and product engineering, execution and delivery currently run through the founders. This role owns engineering execution end-to-end so our CTO can stay focused on architecture and research direction — and so "who's actually productive" becomes visible and fair. What you'll own: Delivery process — Install a right-sized sprint cycle (planning, standups, demos, retrospectives) that's startup-lean, not enterprise-heavy. Define what "done" means — acceptance criteria, testing expectations, deploy process — and run the sprint so commitments are made and met, with slippage caught early. Code quality & review — Set PR standards: review SLAs so no PR sits for days, required approvals, and CI gates that must pass before merge. Enforce them consistently — the goal is reliability, not bureaucracy — and make secret-scanning / push protection part of the review gate. Visibility & accountability — Stand up delivery metrics that resist gaming: cycle time, PR throughput, deploy frequency, escaped defects — never lines of code. Deliver a weekly engineering health report to the founders covering what shipped, what's blocked, and where the risk sits. Distinguish, with evidence, a coachable gap (mentoring plan) from a genuine performance case (documented, direct conversation). People & protection — Run 1:1s with each engineer and give feedback that's specific and regular. Shield engineers from ad-hoc interruptions by routing cross-team pulls through a proper handoff, so engineers spend their time on engineering. First 90 days: Sprint cadence live and adopted; PR/review standard written, enforced, and CI gates in place; a delivery-metrics dashboard shipped with the weekly health report running; a candid written assessment of each engineer's level and trajectory; and interruptions to engineers routed through a defined channel. You'll know it's working when you can predict what ships each sprint, PRs move in hours not days, and the "who's gaming the system" question is answered by visible delivery data rather than suspicion. Scope boundary: this role owns engineering execution. Architecture and product decisions stay with the CTO, and ad-hoc support work stops landing on engineers. Show more