Product Engineer (First Engineering Hire)

About Helira

Helira Energy Private Limited is a brand + technology company for residential rooftop solar in Bengaluru. Helira-certified installers carry out the physical work; the warranty and accountability stay with Helira. Our software is the product: homeowners get a satellite-image rooftop quote in minutes, book online and pay without a site visit. Behind that, an internal proposal and field application keeps every job specified, documented and traceable. Both applications are live in production.

Why this role exists

Both applications were built founder-led with AI-assisted development and are already in production. This is the first engineering hire on payroll, and the person joining owns them from day one — reliability, roadmap and shipping cadence. You will not inherit a backlog written by someone else; you will decide what ships next alongside the founder.

What you will do

• Own reliability, deployment and shipping cadence across both production applications.
• Build the field-capture experience used on-site by installers certified to Helira's standard — photo and instrument-reading checkpoints that must work on patchy mobile networks.
• Extend the AI-assisted quote engine and the vision pipelines that read rooftops from satellite imagery.
• Own third-party integrations: payment gateway, SMS/OTP, maps and geospatial services.
• Ship customer-facing improvements to the self-serve booking and payment journey.
• Work in TypeScript and Next.js against PostgreSQL on a serverless deployment, keeping the architecture as simple as the problem allows.
• Write pragmatic tests around the paths where failure costs money or trust.
• Use AI-assisted development tooling heavily — this is how the team works, and we expect output far beyond what a single engineer would conventionally produce.
• Work directly with the founder on scope, trade-offs and priorities.

Essential requirements

• 3–6 years building full-stack applications with TypeScript, React and Node.
• Genuine production ownership: you have deployed, debugged live incidents and worked with relational databases under load.
• Product judgment — you can take a one-line requirement and ship a considered feature without a product manager translating it for you.
• Comfortable being the only engineer initially, and comfortable with the ambiguity that comes with it.
• Fluent, willing use of AI-assisted development tooling in daily work.
• Based in Bengaluru or relocating; this is an in-person role from September.

Preferred

• Features built on large-language-model APIs in production.
• Geospatial, mapping or satellite-imagery work.
• Payment-gateway integration experience.
• PWA or mobile-web performance work for low-bandwidth conditions.
• Startup or zero-to-one experience.

What we offer

• Ground-floor engineering ownership of a live product heading into its first customers.
• Direct, daily work with the founder on an organisation being built deliberately.
• A clear path into the engineering-lead role as the team grows.

Compensation: competitive for an early-stage startup; finalised at offer.