Lead Product Engineer

Location: Bengaluru, India

Work Model: Hybrid

We're looking for a Lead Product Engineer to anchor our engineering team — someone who works across the full stack, owns the quality, performance, and reliability of the systems they build, and raises the bar for the engineers around them. We practice product-engineering-driven development: engineers work directly from customer problems to shippable prototypes, using modern AI tooling to move fast and iterate in the open. As a lead, you set the standard for how that is done well — shipping product yourself, defining how we validate and operate what we ship, and mentoring engineers as the team grows.

Responsibilities

Product Engineering & AI-Driven Development

• Take ambiguous customer problems from discovery to production: partner directly with product and design, prototype quickly, validate with real users, and iterate to a shippable solution without waiting on fully specified requirements
• Use AI coding tools (e.g., Cursor, Claude Code) as a daily accelerant, and set the standard for using them responsibly — AI-generated code is reviewed, tested, and validated with the same rigor as hand-written code
• Define and evolve the team's practices for AI-assisted development: prompting patterns, review gates, guardrails, and the metrics that show where the tooling actually helps
• Own technical design and trade-off decisions for your area; balance product requirements against maintainability, release risk, and operational readiness

Full Stack

• Design, build, and ship features across the frontend and backend of our product, and own them through release and into production
• Lead API design and data modeling decisions; write clean, well-tested code and hold the team to the same standard through code review
• Identify cross-system dependencies early and drive solutions that work across services, teams, and environments
• Debug and resolve issues surfaced by users or monitoring, and fix the class of problem rather than the single instance

Quality & Performance Engineering

• Own the quality strategy for your area: automated E2E, API, regression, and post-deployment validation integrated into CI/CD so releases ship on evidence, not manual sign-off
• Plan and run load, performance, and soak testing ahead of peak-traffic periods; define load profiles from production telemetry, find and close bottlenecks before they become incidents, and sign off on environment readiness
• Drive measurable efficiency gains — shorter regression cycles, fewer rollbacks, higher automated coverage of critical flows — and report on them

SRE & Production Operations

• Own system health for your services: define SLOs, set up and tune alerting, build the dashboards and runbooks on-call actually uses, and participate in the on-call rotation
• Lead incident response and blameless postmortems; drive root-cause fixes and the follow-through that keeps them from recurring
• Improve deployment pipelines, observability tooling, and infrastructure-as-code; contribute to Kubernetes/cloud migrations and infrastructure cost optimization
• Identify reliability, performance, and scalability gaps proactively and get them on the roadmap with a clear business case

Technical Leadership

• Mentor and grow engineers across product, quality automation, and SRE practices; raise the team's bar through review, pairing, and example
• Align Product, UX, Engineering, SRE, and Customer teams on scope, release activities, and cross-functional dependencies
• Coordinate third-party engagements where needed (e.g., penetration testing, static analysis), including scoping and remediation tracking

Qualifications

• 8+ years of software engineering experience, including hands-on ownership of production systems and at least 2 years leading technical direction for a team or area
• Strong proficiency in at least one modern backend language (e.g., Java, Python, Go) and a modern frontend stack (e.g., React/TypeScript); comfortable shipping across both
• Proven track record building test automation frameworks (e.g., Playwright, Selenium, Postman/Newman) and running performance/load testing programs for high-traffic systems
• Production Kubernetes experience (EKS/GKE or similar), CI/CD ownership (Jenkins, GitHub Actions, ArgoCD, or similar), and cloud infrastructure on AWS/GCP/Azure
• Daily, disciplined use of AI coding assistants (Cursor, Claude Code, Copilot, or similar) with strong judgment about when to trust vs. verify output — and the ability to teach that judgment to others
• Experience with monitoring/observability tooling (Grafana, Prometheus, Datadog, or similar), incident response, and postmortems
• Strong bias toward prototyping and iteration, clear written and verbal communication, and comfort operating in a fast-paced, cross-functional environment
• BS in Computer Science or related field, or equivalent practical experience

Nice to Have

• Experience preparing systems for seasonal or event-driven peak traffic (e.g., 5–10X baseline) with zero-incident outcomes
• Infrastructure cost-optimization or cloud-migration experience with measurable savings
• Release engineering ownership: release cadence, deployment validation, rollback strategy
• Security engineering exposure — coordinating pen tests, SAST/DAST, and remediation
• Experience working across distributed US/India teams

About Picarro:

We are the world's leader in timely, trusted, and actionable data using enhanced optical spectroscopy. Our solutions are used in a wide variety of applications, including natural gas leak detection, ethylene oxide emissions monitoring, semiconductor fabrication, pharmaceutical, petrochemical, atmospheric science, air quality, greenhouse gas measurements, food safety, hydrology, ecology, and more. Our software and hardware are designed and manufactured in Santa Clara, California and are used in over 90 countries worldwide based on over 65 patents related to cavity ring-down spectroscopy (CRDS) technology and are unparalleled in their precision, ease of use, and reliability.

At Picarro, we are committed to fostering a diverse and inclusive workplace. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, sex, color, religion, national origin, protected veteran status, gender identity, social orientation, or disability. Posted positions are not open to third-party recruiters/agencies, and unsolicited resume submissions will be considered free referrals. 

At Picarro, we strive to ensure that all individuals, regardless of their abilities, have equal opportunities. If you are an individual with a disability and require reasonable accommodation to complete any part of the application process or are limited in the ability or unable to access or use this online application process and need an alternative method for applying, please contact Picarro, Inc. at disabilityassistance@picarro.com for assistance.