SDE III - Backend

Job Summary

We're looking for a Senior Backend Software Development Engineer (SDE 3) with deep technical expertise in building and operating production systems at scale. You'll own entire components/services within microservices and data pipelines that handle ~200K queries per second and process petabytes of data daily. This role demands hands-on coding excellence, strong Low-Level Design (LLD) skills, and complete ownership-from component architecture through infrastructure management to cost optimization. You'll architect solutions, lead technical decisions, and drive operational excellence while shipping code daily.

Key Responsibilities:

• Component Ownership: Own one or more critical components/services end-to-end-responsible for architecture, development, deployment, operations, and evolution
• Technical Ownership: Own the entire lifecycle of your components-design, implementation, testing, deployment, monitoring, incident response, and continuous improvement
• Low-Level Design: Create detailed technical designs (LLD) for complex systems-defining data models, APIs, concurrency patterns, and failure modes
• Hands-on Development: Write production-grade code daily-this is not a purely architectural role; you'll be deep in the codebase
• Infrastructure Ownership: Own and operate the infrastructure your components run on-capacity planning, scaling, reliability improvements
• Cost Management: Drive cost optimization for owned components-analyze spending, identify waste, implement efficient architectures
• Scale & Performance: Build and optimize systems handling 200K+ QPS and petabyte-scale data processing
• Observability: Design and implement comprehensive monitoring, alerting, and debugging capabilities for owned components
• Incident Leadership: Lead incident response for your components and related services, conduct post-mortems, drive systemic improvements
• On-Call Excellence: Participate in on-call rotations and ensure your components are operationally sound (runbooks, alerts, dashboards)
• Technical Roadmap: Define and drive the technical roadmap for your owned components-balancing feature development, tech debt, and operational improvements
• Technical Mentorship: Guide junior and mid-level engineers on system design, code quality, and production best practices
• Cross-functional Collaboration: Work with product, infra, and other eng teams to define requirements and deliver solutions
• Agile Execution: Break down complex projects, deliver incrementally in daily cadence, iterate based on feedback

Required Qualifications:

• Experience: 4-5+ years building and operating backend systems in production environments at scale
• Education: B.E./B.Tech in Computer Science or equivalent practical experience
• Component Ownership: Proven track record of owning significant components or services from inception to maturity-demonstrable end-to-end ownership
• Low-Level Design (LLD): Proven ability to create detailed technical designs-data structures, algorithms, API contracts, concurrency models, failure handling
• Programming Mastery: Expert-level proficiency in at least one modern language (Go, Python, Java, etc.) with track record of writing maintainable, performant production code
• Databases: Deep hands-on experience with SQL and NoSQL databases-schema design, query optimization, indexing strategies, operational troubleshooting
• Microservices at Scale: Extensive experience building, deploying, and operating microservices handling high throughput and large data volumes
• Data Pipelines: Strong background designing and running data processing pipelines at scale (batch and/or streaming)
• Observability: Expert understanding of metrics, logging, tracing, and alerting-you know how to make systems debuggable
• Production Operations: Significant experience with incident response, on-call rotations, debugging live issues under pressure
• Infrastructure Knowledge: Hands-on experience managing infrastructure, understanding resource utilization, capacity planning
• Cost Consciousness: Experience analyzing and optimizing infrastructure costs at scale
• Distributed Systems: Strong fundamentals in distributed systems, concurrency, consistency models, and failure scenarios
• Accountability: Track record of taking full ownership-from design through deployment to ongoing operations and improvements

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience with cloud platforms (GCP, AWS, or Azure) including cost management tools
• Kubernetes and container orchestration at scale
• Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Pulumi, etc.)
• Streaming data systems (Kafka, Pub/Sub, Kinesis, Flink, etc.)
• SRE principles and reliability engineering practices
• Experience with FinOps or infrastructure cost optimization
• Performance profiling and optimization (CPU, memory, I/O)
• Technical leadership experience including mentorship of teams and driving multi-component initiatives
• Open source contributions or recognized technical writing