Head of Technology

About Express Stores

Express Stores is an omnichannel startup (online and offline) startup by IIT Delhi, BITS Pilani grads. It is a platform for grocery stores to find trusted business solutions including supply, inventory management and customer relationship management tools. We aim to build a chain of 7/11 stores for India. Express Stores will be the go-to self enable platform for millions of Kirana stores in India to empower them with more business and to empower millions of customers to find right products, in a location nearest to their home with the best quality products, at affordable prices.

The founders have worked at UrbanClap, Jabong, Flyrobe, Wadi.com in India, Dubai and South East Asian Markets. You can read more about the founders at: Apoorv Jain, Kartik Gupta. We are a young, passionate team working on a tough but huge opportunity in India. We believe there is immense value (akin to serendipity) in giving customers the same value of Supermarkets in their neighborhood stores by making them larger, better, cleaner and cheaper. We are backed by some of the best investors in this country, who share this vision with us.

We are looking for our very first VP of Business. This position will eventually lead to heading operations of an entire geography at Express Stores. This is by far the most challenging and demanding position Express Stores has to offer, requiring proven leadership skills and guts. As Express Stores’s first VP (Business), you will be responsible for establishing end-to-end processes for grocery store on-boarding and relationship management, consumer understanding, digitizing the Kirana, understanding the data of sales to improvise the inventory & launch marketing campaign to increase sales, sales force hiring etc. In a nut-shell, you will help the founding team crack the code on how Express Stores can dominate the grocery hyperlocal market in a city. Once that code is cracked and the playbook defined, you will either launch Express Stores in other cities, or train future business team on the same.

Ideal Candidate

Superhuman Full-Stack Developer/Engineer

• Can lead and build a team, including off-shore resources
• Has no issue taking a step back to strategize on Technology Roadmap
• Loves meddling with latest technology

Required Skills

-In Depth understanding and experience of creating scalable architecture.
-Work closely with the founders to plan and execute the product roadmap.
-Strong computer science fundamentals, and algorithms.
-Hands on deep expertise on Python and Python Web, Django (or similar -Web Frameworks like Node.js, RubyonRails etc)
-Solid and proved past experience in SaaS Application development and design
-Experience with designing and building production grade solutions using --AWS services such as EC2, ECS, ELB, Route53, Cloudwatch, AWS OpsWorks, MultiAZ, VPC, IAM, Cognito etc.
-Experience with Serverless Architecture, AWS Lambda.
-Experience working with SQL Databases like MySQL and PostgreSQL and NoSQLs like MongoDB, Redis or AWS DynamoDB
-Expertise in loosely coupled design, Microservices development, Message queues and containerized applications deployment using technologies like RESTful services, Message Queues, and Docker
-Experience with CI/CD pipeline with detailed understanding of Git, Jenkins, TeamCity, Artifactory, and Terraform.
-Hands on with infrastructure automation tools (e.g. Terraform, Chef, Puppet, Salt, or Ansible)
-Good familiarity with Linux operating system
-Understanding and awareness of Secure software development lifecycle and web application vulnerabilities countermeasures, e.g. OWASP Top 10 Security Risks
-Test Driven Development (TDD) mindset and orientation of 100% test automation
-Good exposure to ML, AI, Hadoop multiple projects setups.
-Exposure to HTML5 and CSS3, JavaScript, Angular6 or above, NodeJS, Bootstrap and Material Design will be added advantage
-Mentoring young team members and building a capable, high powered team
-Deeply passionate about what you work on and curiosity to understand the business
-Having worked in a high responsibility and competitive work environment

Responsibilities

-Collaborate with developers, project managers, business analysts and business users in conceptualizing, estimating, developing and building user friendly software applications and enhancements
-Setup and manage a team of rockstar developers.
-Assist in defining software development project plans using innovative ideas, including scoping, scheduling, providing time estimates for programming tasks and implementation plans.
-Assist in the definition, development, and alignment of software's objectives with the business requirements.
-Develop technical documentation to define the system components, development environment and implementation planning/strategies
-Prepare and dispense robust work assignments, provide guidance, and/or review the work of other team members.
-Working hand in hand with the QA team to define test cases, metrics, and resolve questions about test results.
-Recommend business process flow improvements and clearly communicate problem/resolution process to project management.
-Facilitate the design and implementation process for new products/projects, briefing the senior executives of alternatives.
-Perform root cause analysis (RCA) and Impact Analysis for the Company.
-Strong problem solving skills.
-Recognizes and resolves potential areas of improvement.
-Update/create Knowledge Base Articles and case studies as necessary to improve Knowledge Management of the team members.

-Develop technical aspects of the company’s strategy to ensure alignment with its business goals
-Discover and implement new technologies that yield competitive advantage
-Help departments use technology efficiently.
-Supervise system infrastructure to ensure functionality and efficiency
-Build quality assurance and data protection processes
-Monitor KPIs and IT budgets to assess process performance
-Use stakeholders’ feedback to inform necessary improvements and adjustments to technology
-Communicate technological strategies to partners and investors