Senior Specialist- Technology, Udhyam Vyapaar

Own the technology that a nano-business platform runs on.

About Udhyam:

Udhyam Learning Foundation (Udhyam) is on a mission towards Making Bharat Entrepreneurial. We believe that entrepreneurship is a powerful way to channelize an individual’s potential. Entrepreneurship enables agency and allows an individual to work on their strengths while creating value for the world.

Our Programs:

• Udhyam Shiksha works on developing entrepreneurial mindsets among the youth and enabling them to achieve their potential, having impacted ~40,00,000 learners across 12 Indian states.

• Udhyam Vyapaar focuses on nano businesses in India, and solving large problems faced by them, at scale; having already enabled an income uplift for close to 10000 entrepreneurs.

The goal for Udhyam is to build a thriving and supportive ecosystem, where every individual feels empowered to define their own path.

About the Technology team

Anything and everything technology across Udhyam Vyapaar, that defines the role of the technology team. We support every program team with chatbots, data, web and mobile applications, backend validation, internal process automation, and cloud infrastructure.

Our objectives are to help programs scale their solutions using technology, bring AI-based innovation into day-to-day operations, standardize tooling across the organization, find and nurture technology partners we can build with.

Why this role exists

Vyapaar works with nano-entrepreneurs — small shop owners, street vendors, home-based producers. They operate on thin margins, in patchy network conditions, often with limited digital literacy, and almost never in English. Very little off-the-shelf software fits them well.

We are looking for an individual to own that stack end to end: field data collection through our Saathi network, WhatsApp-first delivery to Vyapaaris, voice and vernacular interfaces, the data layer behind our impact measurement, and the AI systems we are now taking into production.

This is a hands-on technology role. You will work on setting the roadmap alongside program leadership, help decide what we build, estimate and deliver high quality outcomes.

What you'll own

• Design and build web and mobile applications that hold up in low-bandwidth and intermittently connected areas — offline-first, low-data, low-end Android

• Build voice-first and vernacular interfaces for users with low digital literacy

• Identify where AI meaningfully improves field operations including evaluation, guardrails, and inference cost control

• Build the data layer that powers impact measurement and funder reporting: pipelines from Saathi field collection through to defined metrics, with data quality and lineage

• Do code reviews, testing, documentation & incident response

Team and partners

• Hire, mentor, and grow the engineering team

• Manage external technology partners, vendors, and other engineering collaborations

• Set engineering practice — review, testing, documentation, incident response — proportionate to a small team rather than ceremony for its own sake

Data responsibility

Own privacy and consent design for data, including obligations under India's DPDP Act and the data commitments we make in grant agreements

Skills and experience

Essential

• 4 - 7 years building software, with strong programming fundamentals and real problem-solving depth — able to go deep in at least one language and pick up others quickly

• Solid database work: schema design, query design and performance, and modelling for

• Fluency with agentic coding tools (Claude Code, Cursor, or similar) to ship quality code at high velocity

• Good grasp of web application design — APIs, authentication, state, caching, failure modes

• Clear written and spoken communication, and the ability to explain a technical tradeoffs

Nice to have

• Built for low-bandwidth, rural, or offline-first contexts in India

• Production experience with AI-native applications — systems real users depend on

• WhatsApp Business API or comparable messaging platforms at scale

• Speech technology (ASR/TTS) or Indic-language NLP

• Data engineering and analytics pipeline ownership

• Cloud infrastructure ownership on AWS or GCP, infrastructure-as-code, and cost management

Mindsets we're looking for

• A genuine pull towards social impact — one that shows up in the tradeoffs you make, not only in your interest in the sector

• Comfort with ambiguous and shifting requirements, and a habit of helping set the requirements rather than waiting to receive them

• Appetite for field immersion. You will spend time in markets with Saathis and Vyapaaris. This is not optional color — it is how you will know what to build