Senior Software Development Engineer - Backend
First seen by Alion on Sep 26, 2026.
About Us:
We are on a mission to help a million+ consumer brands with automated sales and user acquisition via AI omnichannel stack. BusinessOnBot is an omnichannel commerce stack for 500+ Shopify & WooCommerce brands, enabling high-ROI marketing/support across WhatsApp, Instagram, Email, SMS and commerce platforms like Swiggy, Zomato & PhonePe - powered by proprietary shopper intent data from 1/3rd of India's shoppers (100M unique shoppers).
In 2026, Businessonbot has grown and is an EBITDA +ve company. We are a Y Combinator backed company (YC W21) and have closed our pre-series A round with Ant Financials on the Board. Backed by experienced founders/CXOs/directors from renowned companies like WhatsApp, Lulu group, OYO, Netflix, Pepsico, Cleartax, InMobi etc. to add to our team.
Role:
We're looking for a Senior Software Developer who can own the technical health and growth of our backend platform. You'll be part architect, part tech lead, part engineering manager. You won't just review code - you'll set the standard for how code is written, how systems are designed, and how the team thinks about quality, cost, and customer impact.
What You'll Own:
1. System Reliability & Upkeep:
- Own the health of a production multi-tenant Node.js/TypeScript backend serving real-time messaging traffic.
- Lead incident response, root cause analysis, and post-mortem culture.
- Identify and drive reduction of technical debt - proactively, not reactively.
- Ensure monitoring, alerting, and observability are in good shape (we use New Relic, Sentry, Pino structured logging).
- Work across multiple backend services and ensure they integrate reliably.
2. Scalable, Quality Engineering:
- Design and review system architecture decisions - schema changes, service boundaries, async workflows (we use Temporal.io), queue design.
- Drive engineering standards: code review culture, PR quality, test coverage, error handling patterns.
- Establish and enforce engineering practices that let the team ship fast without accumulating hidden risk.
- Evaluate build vs. buy decisions with a clear eye on long-term maintainability.
3. Cost Consciousness:
- Maintain a clear understanding of infrastructure costs (AWS, third-party APIs, LLM usage, DB compute).
- Actively flag cost anomalies and propose architectural or operational changes to address them.
- Balance engineering investment against business return - know when "good enough" is the right call.
4. Team Standards & Culture:
- Set a high bar for code quality - not pedantry, but clarity, maintainability, and correctness.
- Build a review culture where feedback is constructive, specific, and educational.
- Help engineers grow by pair debugging, design reviews, and code walkthroughs.
- Define and document coding conventions, architecture patterns, and engineering principles that persist beyond any individual.
5. Customer Empathy:
- Understand that the systems you build serve real D2C businesses who depend on them to communicate with their customers.
- Treat reliability issues with the urgency of a customer escalation, not a backlog item.
- Stay connected to what support and product teams are seeing from customers - let that shape engineering priorities.
6. Communication & Stakeholder Management:
- Translate technical complexity into clear, honest language for non-technical co-founders and stakeholders.
- Communicate risk, timelines, and tradeoffs clearly - no sugar-coating, no unnecessary alarm.
- Manage up: surface the right problems at the right time without waiting to be asked.
- Manage expectations - both internally with the team and externally with leadership.
7. Balancing Trade offs:
- Navigate the tension between shipping fast and building right - and be able to articulate why you chose one over the other.
- Know when to take on short-term debt and when to push back.
- Make architectural decisions that serve the next 18 months, not just the next sprint.
What We're Looking For:
- 4 - 6 years of backend software engineering experience.
- Strong command of TypeScript/Node.js in production.
- Deep understanding of multi-tenant SaaS architecture patterns.
- Hands-on experience with relational databases (MySQL/PostgreSQL), ORM usage (TypeORM or similar), and writing efficient queries at scale.
- Experience designing and operating async/event-driven systems (message queues, workflow engines, or similar).
- Comfort with cloud infrastructure (AWS preferred) and cost/performance monitoring.
- Strong pull request review discipline.
Strong Plus:
- Experience with real-time systems (WebSockets, Socket.IO, pub/sub patterns).
- Exposure to LLM integration, RAG pipelines, or AI feature development in production.
- Experience with Temporal.io or similar workflow orchestration.
- Familiarity with WhatsApp Business API, omnichannel messaging, or e-commerce integrations.
- Prior experience at a startup in the 10 - 100 person range.
What We Offer:
- Direct access to founders and product decisions.
- Competitive compensation (cash + equity discussion based on profile).
- A product that real businesses depend on every day - your work matters immediately.
Skills
Node.js, MySQL, PostgreSQL, AWS, Backend Architecture, Site Reliability, TypeScript, RDBMS, Temporal