Ashish Jain (Head of Engineering, LEAD School) is building edtech infrastructure that reaches 40 lakh students across 8,000+ schools — in cities where electricity cuts out for two hours a day. He joins Naman to unpack:

• The ChatGPT moment that made him feel liberated to code again — a support app shipped to production in 2.5 days
• Why "ability to think" is now the only real differentiator between engineers, not ability to code
• LEAD's five-area AI framework: development, data analysis, ops, research, and content generation
• How product managers are now shipping voice prototypes without ever talking to a developer
• Why Claude has become the new junior developer — and what that means for people entering the field today
• The weather app interview that replaced algorithm questions

Plus the bad hire he still thinks about — the candidate hired on accolades and brand name whose judgment he overrode — and what the three-trait hiring rubric that replaced it looks like. We close with Ashish's framework for staying relevant: build a lot, fail a lot, and talk to people constantly.

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About the podcast - Hiring in the age of AI
Hiring is being rewritten in the age of AI. Each episode, Naman Muley, Founder and CEO at utkrusht.ai, sits down with engineering leaders who actually own headcount budgets and interview loops to dig into what they're seeing change — how teams use AI day-to-day, what signals still matter in candidates, and how the definition of a "good hire" is shifting. Every guest also takes a live assessment, and we review it together on air.

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Show notes

• LEAD School: https://www.leadschool.in

Vedang Manerikar (co-founder, Unravel.Tech; ex-Helpshift, head of backend) believes AI builders still need to learn engineering fundamentals. He joins Naman to unpack:

• Why services beats product in the agentic era
• How veterans of 15+ years spot AI talent
• The rule that anchors his AI philosophy: never ask an agent to do something you don't know how to do yourself
• Unravel's $200/employee Claude Code budget and Friday lightning talks
• How the hiring loop evolved from week-long takehomes to a split assignment with live pair programming

Plus war stories — the non-CS hire who struggled for three months then turned into one of the best engineers Vedang ever worked with, and his first fire as a manager. We close with a live walkthrough of Vedang's 30-minute Python/Redis assessment on Utkrusht.

About the Bar Raiser podcast

Hiring is being rewritten in the age of AI. Each episode, Naman Muley, Founder and CEO at utkrusht.ai, sits down with engineering leaders who actually own headcount budgets and interview loops to dig into what they're seeing change — how teams use AI day-to-day, what signals still matter in candidates, and how the definition of a "good hire" is shifting. Every guest also takes a live assessment, and we review it together on air.

Show notes

• Vedang's Programming Guide: https://vedang.me/programmer-guide/