Senior Zoho One Engineer & AI/ML Systems Engineer (Multi-Tenant Platform Role)

About the Role

We are building an AI-first operations platform that serves dozens (and eventually hundreds) of client companies running on Zoho One. The platform centralizes AI capabilities—document ingestion, blueprint parsing, workflow intelligence, copilots—while maintaining strict tenant isolation across independent Zoho client organizations. We are pre-VC, revenue-generating, and architecting the systems required for venture-scale growth. Zoho is the execution layer across all clients; AI is the intelligence layer that feeds and augments those executions. This role exists to own both and to help define how they evolve together.

While Zoho engineering and AI/ML engineering are different disciplines with minimal overlap, this role is intentionally designed for a senior Zoho engineer who will actively grow into a strong AI/ML engineer over time. This is not a transition away from Zoho. Zoho remains a core responsibility. In parallel, you are expected to take on increasing ownership of AI-driven systems and contribute directly to the AI/ML codebase.

You must already have real programming experience beyond Zoho-only tooling. This is not a low-code-only role and not a prompt-engineering position. You will work alongside AI/ML engineers initially, then increasingly co-own system design, implementation, and operational decisions for AI-integrated workflows. As the team grows, this role may evolve into technical leadership or people management for the AI/ML and hybrid systems team, if that path is of interest to you.

Core Responsibilities

• Zoho & Workflow Ownership
  • Design, implement, and maintain production-grade workflows across Zoho CRM, Creator, Desk, Books, Analytics, and related apps
  • Build deterministic, auditable, permission-aware workflows that run real business operations
  • Implement Blueprints, workflow rules, approvals, escalations, and exception handling
  • Standardize Zoho schemas and workflow patterns across dozens of client organizations
  • Manage workflow versioning, rollout, and rollback without disrupting live clients
• AI-Integrated Systems
  • Integrate AI outputs (OCR, document parsing, classification, scoring, recommendations) into Zoho workflows
  • Define and enforce hard contracts between AI systems and Zoho execution logic (schemas, confidence thresholds, provenance)
  • Design human-in-the-loop workflows for review, approval, and override of AI results
  • Handle AI edge cases: low confidence, ambiguity, partial outputs, and failure modes
  • Contribute directly to AI-adjacent code and system logic over time
• Multi-Tenant Platform Control
  • Support a centralized AI core serving many Zoho tenants with strict isolation
  • Implement per-tenant feature flags, permissions, and workflow enablement
  • Ensure tenant-specific policies (logging, data handling, approvals) are respected
  • Participate in staged rollout and release control of AI-enabled workflows
• Growth & Leadership
  • Continuously deepen AI/ML engineering skills
  • Take increasing ownership of AI-driven product areas
  • Optionally grow into technical leadership or people management as the team scales
  • Help shape architecture decisions that impact scalability and fundraising readiness

Requirements

• Zoho & Workflow Ownership
  • Design, implement, and maintain production-grade workflows across Zoho CRM, Creator, Desk, Books, Analytics, and related apps
  • Build deterministic, auditable, permission-aware workflows that run real business operations
  • Implement Blueprints, workflow rules, approvals, escalations, and exception handling
  • Standardize Zoho schemas and workflow patterns across dozens of client organizations