Founding Engineers — AI Systems, Sovereign Cloud & Security (Remote)

Company: Venport (Backed by Loktara Ventures)
Location: Remote (India)
Compensation: Competitive Indian Product-Tier Base Salary + 1.0% Founding Equity (standard 4-year vesting, 1-year cliff)

The Hard Problem We’re Solving

Global import/export compliance,the bedrock of international commerce,runs on brittle, archaic software. Custom House Agents (CHAs) and trade agencies lose thousands of hours and millions in demurrage fines to manual data entry, opaque tariff structures, and fragile government portals that require weeks of training to navigate.
At Venport, we are building a zero-training, autonomous compliance engine that turns raw commercial invoices, packing lists, and regulatory feeds into instant, validated customs filings.
We have institutional backing from Loktara Ventures, validated customer demand from industry operators, and a blank architectural slate. Now, we are hiring the three founding technical pillars who will own our core production systems from commit zero.

The Founding Roles 

1. Founding AI Systems Engineer

The Mission: Trade compliance demands 100% deterministic accuracy over messy, unstructured documents and erratic government portals. You will architect the perception, extraction, and multi-agent execution engine that bridges raw trade data with live customs systems.

• Resilient Portal Automation: Build fault-tolerant, headless browser and state-machine pipelines to interface with legacy government portals (e.g., ICEGATE), handling session drops and DOM shifts to ingest live regulatory updates.
• Deterministic Multi-Agent Orchestration: Design stateful agent workflows (LangGraph, custom state machines, or DAG orchestrators) capable of cross-verifying HS codes, duty drawbacks, and compliance rules without hallucinating.
• Inference & Token Economics: Implement semantic caching, context pruning, and structured output pipelines to achieve sub-second latency and aggressive unit-cost efficiency per shipping bill processed.
• Domain Adaptation: Fine-tune and quantize open-weight LLMs and Vision-Language Models (VLMs) on multi-page shipping manifests, skewed scans, and Indian customs tariff schedules.

2. Founding Cloud & Infrastructure Engineer

The Mission: In international logistics, server downtime directly translates to ships stuck at port and heavy regulatory penalties. You will build a high-availability, low-latency, sovereign cloud architecture optimized for both strict Indian data localization and compute unit economics.

• Sovereign & Hybrid Cloud Architecture: Architect and deploy production workloads across Indian sovereign cloud providers (E2E Networks, NxtGen, Yotta) alongside bare-metal GPU instances to satisfy DPDP Act/data residency mandates while slashing hyperscaler egress taxes.
• 99.99% Availability & Self-Healing Systems: Build automated failover mechanisms, zero-downtime blue/green deployment pipelines, and observability stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry) that keep trade operations running 24/7.
• Data & Latency Engineering: Tune API gateways, distributed caching layers (Valkey/Redis), and hybrid transactional/vector databases (PostgreSQL + pgvector/Qdrant) for sub-second end-to-end query execution under high concurrency.
• Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Manage reproducible Kubernetes (K8s/K3s) clusters, isolated worker queues, and GPU inference nodes entirely via Terraform/OpenTofu.

3. Founding Security & Platform Defense Lead

The Mission: Our platform ingests highly sensitive commercial trade secrets, supply chain pricing, and government credentials. A single breach ends the company. You will establish a zero-trust security posture and hardened ingestion perimeter from day one.

• Zero-Trust & Multi-Tenant Isolation: Architect end-to-end encryption (in transit and at rest), strict row-level security (RLS) in PostgreSQL, and isolated tenant enclaves so competitor trade data never intersects.
• Anti-Bot Evasion & Egress Security: Engineer resilient residential/datacenter proxy meshes, automated fingerprint rotation, and rate-limit governors so our government portal ingestion pipelines operate reliably without IP blacklisting.
• Runtime Telemetry & Identity: Secure internal and external API surfaces using OAuth2/OIDC, fine-grained RBAC, secrets management (Vault/Infisical), and kernel-level eBPF runtime monitoring.
• Continuous Compliance Readiness: Embed automated SAST/DAST gates into CI/CD and build audit-ready logging architectures to fast-track SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 certification.

Why Join as a Founding Engineer? (Beyond the Comp)

When you join an early-stage team at 1.0% founding equity and a product-tier base salary, you should know exactly what leverage you get in return:

1. Zero Legacy Debt, 100% Architectural Authority: There is no spaghetti codebase inherited from an outsourced agency. You pick the languages, define the schemas, set the PR standards, and build the systems the way you’ve always wanted them built.
2. Direct Line to Users & Revenue: We aren't building a wrapper looking for a problem. We have direct access to CHAs and logistics operators waiting on our deployments. Code you ship on Tuesday gets tested in live customs workflows by Thursday.
3. Milestone-Backed Runway (Loktara Ventures): We have institutional backing structured around clear execution milestones. You get the speed and upside of a day-zero startup without wondering if payroll will clear next month.
4. Founding Lead Trajectory: As we unlock subsequent funding tranches and expand the team, you are not getting layered over by outside VPs—you are the foundational technical leadership building and hiring your respective teams.

Our Origin & Culture

Venport started in a college dorm room because we refused to accept that a multi-billion-dollar global trade corridor should run on software that looks and feels like the 19s. While our peers chased standard placement tracks, we spent months embedded with trade compliance operators, dissecting every bottleneck in the import/export lifecycle.
We bring obsessive market clarity, customer access, and institutional capital. We are looking for low-ego, high-agency builders who want their fingerprints on the core architecture of an industry-defining platform.

Explore our website to get more info: venportai-website.vercel.app