Founding CTO, ChatAstro


We’re looking for a hands-on Founding CTO with real experience building and scaling B2C app-led products, especially mobile-first consumer apps, along with strong technical ability to architect and evolve AI-native product experiences.
Remote (India preferred) / Mumbai
Equity-heavy + competitive cash

About ChatAstro

ChatAstro is building an AI-powered Vedic astrology companion from India to the world.

We combine structured astrological calculations with conversational AI to give users personalized guidance across love, career, money, health, and life decisions — without the friction, opacity, and high cost of traditional astrologer marketplaces.

We are building for repeat consumer usage, strong retention, and long-term trust. This is a founder-led company with early traction, strong ambition, and a product-led vision.

The Role

We are looking for a hands-on Founding CTO with real experience building and scaling B2C app-led products, especially mobile-first consumer businesses.

This is the most important filter for the role.

Alongside strong B2C product and engineering experience, we also want someone with the technical depth and curiosity to build and evolve an AI-native product stack. You do not need to be a model researcher, but you should be strong enough to architect and improve AI-powered user experiences using LLMs, orchestration layers, personalization, guardrails, and evaluation systems.

This is not a manager-only role. We want a builder who can own the product technically end-to-end, work closely with the founder, and help shape both the product and the engineering culture from the ground up.

What You’ll Own

  • Build and own ChatAstro’s core technical foundation across backend, APIs, database, auth, payments, and product infrastructure

  • Lead the technical build-out of a mobile-first consumer app designed for activation, retention, repeat usage, and monetization

  • Improve onboarding, chat experience, user flows, lifecycle engagement, and app reliability

  • Architect and improve the AI application layer: prompt/system design, orchestration, context handling, guardrails, structured outputs, personalization, and response quality

  • Own integrations with astrology engines / third-party APIs and ensure reliability, accuracy, observability, and scale

  • Set up strong analytics, event tracking, internal tooling, and experimentation systems to support product and growth decisions

  • Build re-engagement systems such as notifications, triggers, segmentation, and retention loops

  • Support app quality across Android (and later iOS): release hygiene, crash monitoring, performance, and stability

  • Over time, hire and lead the early engineering team

What We’re Looking For

Must-Have

  • Proven experience building and scaling B2C app-led products

  • Strong understanding of consumer product metrics: activation, engagement, retention, conversion, churn, and LTV

  • Strong hands-on engineering ability across backend systems, APIs, databases, cloud infrastructure, and production architecture

  • Experience working on mobile-first user journeys, monetization flows, notifications, and lifecycle engagement

  • Strong product instinct and ability to work closely with founder, growth, and design

  • High ownership, startup speed, and comfort operating in ambiguity

Strongly Preferred

  • Experience building or shipping AI-powered product experiences

  • Familiarity with AI application engineering, including:

    • LLM-based product flows

    • prompt / system design

    • orchestration layers

    • context and memory handling

    • guardrails and fallback logic

    • response evaluation

    • personalization systems

  • Experience translating AI capabilities into reliable user-facing product experiences

  • Experience with chat-based, habit-driven, subscription-led, or repeat-use consumer products

  • Experience with product analytics, experimentation, retention systems, and notification engines

Nice to Have

  • Experience in India-focused consumer internet products

  • Experience with 0→1 and 1→10 startup building

  • Familiarity with spiritual-tech, astrology, or personalized guidance categories

  • Experience hiring and managing small engineering teams

Technical Scope

The technical challenge at ChatAstro is not just shipping features. It is building a consumer AI product that users trust and return to.

That includes:

  • backend systems that are reliable and scalable

  • chat flows that feel smooth and personalized

  • AI outputs that are useful, consistent, and grounded

  • clean analytics and event instrumentation

  • monetization flows that convert without hurting trust

  • lifecycle systems that drive repeat engagement

  • architecture that can scale with product growth

What Success Looks Like

· Users reach first value quickly after onboarding

· The product drives strong repeat engagement, not one-time novelty

· Monetization flows become cleaner and conversion improves

· Analytics clearly show what is driving activation, retention, and revenue

· AI responses improve in consistency, personalization, and trustworthiness

· The app remains stable, fast, and scalable as usage grows

· Engineering becomes a real product advantage, not just a support function

Why Join

This is a chance to build a consumer AI product at the intersection of AI, trust, personalisation at scale and culture.

You will help define the technical foundation, the product quality, and the long-term moat of ChatAstro.

Compensation

This is a founding-level role with meaningful ownership.
Equity-heavy + competitive cash.