Location: Bangalore (in-office)
Experience: 0-2 years (Preferable experience of 0-1 stage)
1990 Research Labs helps enterprises understand what Indian consumers say, do, think, and feel.
Today, most consumer research lives at one of two extremes: fast but shallow surveys, or deep but expensive projects that end in a deck. We are building a third model: continuous consumer intelligence—an always-learning system that combines participant panels, interviews, surveys, consumer signals, on-demand studies, AI-assisted collection and synthesis, and an intelligence layer that helps teams act on what they learn.
Canvass is the product and infrastructure layer behind that system. It is not just a survey tool. It is where a company can recruit and manage a consumer panel, run studies, screen and schedule participants, communicate with them, manage incentives, capture responses, and build a growing consumer corpus over time.
We are looking for a Founding Full-Stack Product Engineer to help make that real.
You will be a core product builder at 1990 Research Labs, working directly with the founder, research leads, and operations team.
This is not a role where you receive polished specs and implement tickets. You will take messy operational problems—finding the right participants, getting them through a screener, ensuring a researcher can make a decision, or making a client workflow dependable—and turn them into simple, durable product experiences.
You will inherit a live and evolving Canvass system, then help shape what it becomes: a dependable subscription product for continuous consumer intelligence.
- The experience of being heard: make it genuinely easy and rewarding for people to share what they think, do, and feel.
- The tools behind better questions: build the product experiences that help research teams move from a vague question to real consumer understanding.
- The intelligence layer: turn many individual conversations, responses, and signals into something a company can return to, learn from, and act on over time.
- A product that works in the real world: take ideas from concept to dependable, polished, production-ready experiences.
- The engineering foundation: make thoughtful architectural decisions, improve quality and reliability, and leave the system clearer and stronger than you found it.
- You have built and owned a real product end to end—not only contributed one component to a large codebase.
- You are strong in modern full-stack web development, especially TypeScript, React/Next.js, APIs, and relational data systems.
- You can move comfortably between product UX, backend logic, integrations, deployment, debugging, and production reliability.
- You have worked with or can quickly learn systems involving authentication, roles and permissions, public forms, webhooks, notifications, background jobs, file uploads, and third-party APIs.
- You know how to make a critical user journey testable and how to investigate a failure when it happens in production.You have high agency.
- You can take an ambiguous problem, clarify the real constraint, propose a small first version, and ship it.
- You communicate clearly: what is live, what is incomplete, what is risky, and what decision is needed.
- You build things outside work—tools, experiments, side projects, open-source contributions, or products. We care about evidence that you are compelled to make things.
- You have worked on consumer products, fintech, marketplaces, operations software, research-tech, or other products where software meets messy real-world workflows.
- You have integrated messaging, payments, scheduling, analytics, or CRM-like systems.
- You have experience with Supabase/PostgreSQL or comparable production backend systems.
- You have designed for users with very different levels of digital comfort, including assisted or mobile-first journeys.
- You use AI-assisted development tools deeply and responsibly.
- You can use Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, or equivalent tools to move faster—while retaining engineering judgment, code quality, security, and ownership.You care about Indian consumers, product behavior, research, or the systems through which companies understand people.
We are a small team. Research and operations people will be using the product while it is still evolving. Client work creates real deadlines. Not every problem is a software problem, and not every feature should be built.
- talk to the people doing the work before designing the solution;
- distinguish a real operational bottleneck from a nice-to-have;
- ship a narrow, working version before expanding scope;
- use staging, PRs, tests, demos, and documentation as part of delivery—not bureaucracy after it;
- explain technical trade-offs to non-engineering teammates without hiding behind jargon;
- challenge us when the product is becoming more complicated without becoming more useful.
Dharmesh Ba has spent the last decade embedded in the Indian consumer internet ecosystem. Through 1990 Research Labs, he has worked with consumer brands at critical stages of growth, helping them understand their users and make better product and business decisions.
He also runs The India Notes, a publication on Indian consumer psychology and digital product behavior for founders, operators, investors, and researchers.
