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PRANJUL RATHOUR
PRANJUL RATHOUR

Posted on Originally published at pranjulrathour.scult.in

Getting a remote GenAI role from a tier-2 city in India

#remotework #career #tier2 #genai

Kanpur is not where AI companies come to hire on campus. That has never stopped anyone here from working for them. Remote GenAI roles judge repositories, writing and reliability, and all three can be built from any city with an internet connection. Here is the playbook I give students who want to stay where they are and still work on serious systems.

Where remote roles actually appear

  • Startup job boards and the careers pages of small AI companies, which hire remotely by default.
  • Founders' posts on LinkedIn and X — many roles are filled before they become listings.
  • Open-source communities around the tools you use; maintainers and contributors hire each other.
  • Referrals from practitioners you met at hackathons and sessions. This is why showing up matters.

What remote employers screen for

  1. A project they can run in five minutes from a URL.
  2. Written communication — a README, a blog post, a clear message — because remote work is mostly writing.
  3. Evidence of finishing things without supervision: shipped side projects, hackathon results, a community you ran.
  4. Comfort with asynchronous work: documenting decisions, updating without being asked.

Skills that travel

Retrieval, evaluation, deployment and debugging production LLM apps — the roadmap skills. Plus the meta-skill remote teams value most: writing a good update. "Shipped the reranker; recall@5 up from 0.78 to 0.91; blocked on API quota, requested increase" is a message that gets you kept.

The application

  • A short message: who you are, one link, one sentence on why this company, one question.
  • The resume as a single page with projects first.
  • A time-zone note and your availability, stated plainly.

Meanwhile

Freelance AI work and local clients keep you building while you apply; SCULT INDIA grew from exactly that. And your city has a community — Kanpur has MeetKats and TechVerse Enclave — where the next referral is sitting across the table. See building a tech career from Kanpur.

About Pranjul Rathour

Pranjul Rathour in a checked shirt inside a packed college auditorium
In a packed college auditorium

Pranjul Rathour in a suit and tie with a lanyard at a formal campus event
At a formal campus event

Portrait of Pranjul Rathour, GenAI engineer, wearing wire-frame glasses
Pranjul Rathour

Pranjul Rathour presenting on stage in a blue polo, with his Annapurna demo video on the screen behind him
Presenting Annapurna on stage

Pranjul Rathour giving a talk titled 'How and what I do', with demo videos of his products Vaidya and Annapurna on screen
Talking through the products he has shipped

Pranjul Rathour is a GenAI engineer from Kanpur, India, and CTO at SCULT INDIA, currently shipping production RAG,
fine-tuning and agentic AI systems, mentoring 200+ students through TechVerse Enclave, and judging and speaking at
student hackathons across India. Updated 2026-09-07.

Reach out if you want to talk GenAI, book a campus session, or invite him to judge:

Pranjul Rathour · GenAI engineer, 3x hackathon winner, campus mentor. Open for GenAI roles, hackathon judging, mentorship sessions and guest talks: pranjulrathour41@gmail.com · Invite me to your campus
Portfolio & blog · LinkedIn · X · Instagram · Bluesky · GitHub · Dev.to

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