Practice Lead

About the company:

devx labs is an AI-native consulting company that fundamentally reimagines business operations around AI capabilities. We don’t just implement AI tools - we transform how enterprises operate through first-principles thinking and outcome-driven execution.

About the role:

As a Practice Lead - Customer Interactions at devx labs, you'll own the technical problem-solving in the space between the business problem and production engineering – architecting solutions, making technology choices, validating feasibility, and providing technical direction to the engineering team.

You will work across software architecture, AI systems, integrations, APIs, cloud infrastructure, data, and emerging technologies to design and validate solutions for real-world enterprise use cases.

This is not a role where you document requirements and hand them off. It is also not a pure engineering role. You'll move between a client conversation, a technical architecture diagram, and a working prototype, sometimes in the same day.

We're looking for someone who is technically curious, commercially aware, comfortable with ambiguity, and hands-on enough to build and test their ideas.

Problem Discovery & Solution Design

• Understand business processes, operational workflows, customer journeys, and technology landscapes to identify meaningful opportunities for transformation.
• Participate in client discovery sessions and translate ambiguous business problems into clearly defined technical problems and solution approaches.
• Architect end-to-end solutions spanning applications, AI/ML systems, APIs, integrations, data layers, cloud infrastructure, and third-party platforms.
• Translate requirements into system architecture, technical components, interfaces, data flows, and implementation approaches – decomposing complex systems into well-defined boundaries.
• Make and defend architectural decisions: build vs. buy, technology selection, integration patterns, and trade-offs across scalability, reliability, security, cost, and time-to-value.
• Define functional and non-functional requirements and validate feasibility before committing to production implementation.
• Produce architecture diagrams, technical specifications, and solution narratives detailed enough for engineering teams to implement.
• Work closely with engineers during implementation to ensure architecture is correctly translated into production systems; review designs and challenge assumptions where required.
• Research existing systems, SaaS platforms, APIs, AI capabilities, and emerging technologies that could address a problem.

Technology Research & Evaluation

• Maintain deep, evidence-based understanding of modern software and AI technologies and not just whether they can solve a problem, but their architecture, limitations, operational requirements, scalability, and failure modes.
• Evaluate tools, platforms, models, and vendors through hands-on experimentation rather than documentation or marketing claims alone.
• Benchmark and compare competing technologies and architectural approaches; conduct landscape research to understand what's possible and where solutions fit.
• Develop clear technical recommendations that balance capability, business requirements, constraints, and ROI – and be able to defend them with reasoning and evidence.

Prototyping & Technical Validation

• Build rapid POCs and reference implementations to validate architecture, technology choices, integrations, and feasibility before committing to production.
• Get hands-on with APIs, SDKs, AI models, cloud services, and third-party platforms to validate assumptions directly – don't rely solely on engineering teams.
• Break down validated concepts into production-ready requirements; identify and bridge gaps between a POC and a scalable implementation.

Technical Consulting & Client Engagement

• Lead technical discovery and architecture discussions with client engineering, IT, product, and business teams.
• Act as the technical authority in client conversations – communicate architecture, trade-offs, risks, and implementation approaches to both technical and executive audiences.
• Challenge client assumptions and existing architecture when a stronger technical approach exists.
• Support workshops, presentations, and product demos; help shape proposals, SOWs, implementation plans, and technical estimates.

Technical & Commercial Thinking

• Make pragmatic architectural decisions – balancing technical excellence with scalability, reliability, security, cost, and time-to-value; know when simplicity beats sophistication.
• Understand the long-term implications of architectural decisions across the system lifecycle.
• Clearly communicate technical risks, dependencies, assumptions, and trade-offs to both technical and business stakeholders.

Mindset

• Strong problem solver who enjoys figuring out ambiguous problems.
• Naturally curious about how technology works and what is becoming possible.
• Comfortable learning unfamiliar technologies quickly.
• Pragmatic and outcome-oriented; you care about solving the right problem, not just building technically interesting things.
• Able to operate independently while knowing when to bring in deeper engineering expertise.
• Comfortable moving between business conversations and technical implementation.

Technical Skills

• Strong expertise in software architecture and system design, with demonstrated experience architecting and designing production systems or technically complex POCs.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems, APIs, microservices/service-oriented architectures, databases, cloud infrastructure, authentication/authorization, networking, observability, and system integration patterns.
• Demonstrated experience making architecture and technology selection decisions on real projects.
• Ability to reason about system characteristics such as scalability, reliability, availability, latency, security, maintainability, and cost.
• Strong hands-on understanding of at least one modern programming ecosystem and the ability to read and write production-quality code when required.
• Experience designing and implementing API integrations and complex third-party system integrations.
• Experience with at least one major cloud platform like AWS, GCP, or Azure.****

Consulting & Communication

• Strong written and verbal communication.
• Ability to structure ambiguous problems and communicate them clearly.
• Comfortable presenting technical ideas to clients and senior stakeholders.
• Strong research and analytical skills.
• Ability to translate technical capabilities into business outcomes.
• Experience with consulting, solution engineering, pre-sales, product management, business analysis, or technical client-facing roles is a strong advantage.

Experience

• 3 - 6 years of experience across software engineering, technology consulting, solution engineering, product, business analysis, or related roles.
• Demonstrated experience architecting and designing technology solutions for real-world use cases.
• At least 2–3 examples of projects where you personally contributed to the architecture, technology selection, technical design, and/or implementation.
• Experience taking a technical problem from requirements → architecture → POC/implementation → production or technical recommendation.
• Comfortable presenting and defending technical architecture decisions to senior technical and business stakeholders.

What would make you exceptional

• You've architected and built systems end-to-end, and understand the implications of decisions across every layer of the stack.
• You can look at a business process and instinctively start asking, "Why does it work this way?"
• You regularly experiment with new technologies on your own.
• You can evaluate a new AI platform in a few hours and form a reasoned opinion about where it is actually useful.
• You can sketch an architecture on a whiteboard and then build enough of it to prove that the idea works.
• You understand that the best technical solution isn't necessarily the most technically sophisticated one.
• You can sit with a founder or CXO, understand their problem, and then spend the next few days figuring out how to solve it.
• You have strong opinions, but are willing to change them when the evidence says otherwise.

• AI tool credits and freedom to experiment with modern approaches.
• Performance-based appraisal at 6 months + annual appraisal cycle.
• Competitive pay with a structured CTC breakup.
• Work with clients across industries and domains.
• Hybrid model with work-from-home support and flexible working hours.
• No-cap leave policy — take time off responsibly, no fixed limits.
• Health insurance with spouse and kids coverage included.
• Yearly outings, and an open environment for innovation.