Engineering Manager; AI

Position: Engineering Manager (AI)
We are building Atlas, Pepper's agentic operating system. We want an Engineering Manager who has been in the weeds of agentic systems, drives delivery hard, and is hungry to grow into more.

About Pepper

Pepper is the Agentic Organic Growth System that drives outcomes. We combine strategy, AI agents, and embedded expert operators to drive growth via SEO and AI-search for 2,500+ industry leaders, including Amazon, Google, Unilever, Atlassian, HSBC, and Instacart. Atlas is the agentic operating system that powers it all.

About the role

This is a hands-on Engineering Manager role for someone who has spent meaningful time building agentic systems and now wants to scale that impact through a team.
You will own delivery for a core surface of Atlas, leading a team of 10 to 12 engineers across backend, platform, and AI infrastructure. You will set the technical bar, drive the roadmap to ship, and stay close enough to the code to lead by example. You will run the team, not just chair its meetings: hiring, growing engineers, raising the quality bar, and removing what blocks them.
We want someone sharp, fast, and hungry. This is a next-step role for an engineer who has been on the management track for a few years and is ready to drive bigger scope at speed.

This role is in-person at Pepper's Mumbai office in Andheri East.

What you will own

Drive delivery for a core surface of Atlas: roadmap, milestones, and shipping to production on time at high quality.
Lead a team of 10 to 12 engineers across backend, platform, and AI infrastructure. Hire sharp, grow them fast, and raise the bar.
Stay hands-on with agentic systems: design reviews, code reviews, and the trickiest implementations, including agent orchestration, workflows, evals, guardrails, and human-in-the-loop.
Set and enforce engineering standards: code quality, testing, CI/CD, observability, on-call, and incident response.
Plan and execute the roadmap with Product, AI, and design partners, breaking work down so the team can move fast without rework.
Run a tight delivery system: clear scope, real estimates, honest status, and aggressive unblocking of the team.
Own the team's growth: 1:1s, feedback, performance, and career paths, so engineers level up under you.

What you bring to the table

You have built agentic systems hands-on.  You have spent meaningful time building with LLMs, agent orchestration, tools, evals, guardrails, and human-in-the-loop, and you understand how these systems break in production.
You have managed teams of 10 to 12.  You have led engineering teams of around this size, with real ownership of hiring, delivery, and growth.
You drive delivery.  You have a track record of shipping on time and at quality, holding scope and timelines without dropping standards.
You are still in the code.  You stay technical enough to lead design and code reviews and to make the calls that need engineering judgment.
You have the depth.  Several years of building and scaling backend and platform systems, APIs, microservices, and workflows on cloud (AWS, GCP, or similar), with command of system design, scalability, and reliability.
You are sharp and fast.  You think clearly, deconstruct problems quickly, and make sound calls without overthinking.
You are hungry to grow.  You see this as a real next step, not a coasting role. You want bigger scope, you take feedback well, and you grow fast.
You work cleanly cross-functionally.  You collaborate well with Product, AI, and design, and you communicate crisply with stakeholders.

Why this role matters

Atlas is being built now. The agentic workflows, the reliability, and the intelligence all get built by teams that ship, not by teams that plan. Your team is one of those, and you are the person turning the plan into shipped product.

If you have been deep in agentic systems, want to drive a strong team to ship hard, and are hungry for the next step in scope and seniority, this is the seat.