Backend Engineer

We are looking for an experienced Backend Software Engineer with 6-8 years of experience in designing, developing, and operating scalable, high-performance backend systems. You will take end-to-end ownership of backend services, distributed systems, data pipelines, API contracts, testing, deployment, and production observability. You will work closely with a hands-on engineering team to build and maintain reliable infrastructure supporting India's open digital commerce ecosystem. The ideal candidate has strong backend engineering fundamentals, hands-on experience with distributed systems, and a proven track record of delivering production-grade services under demanding performance and reliability requirements.

Responsibilities:

• Design, develop, build, and architect scalable backend services, APIs, data pipelines, and system integrations supporting high-volume transactions across the ONDC network.
• Build and optimise distributed systems to maintain high availability, data consistency, fault tolerance, and low latency, targeting p99 latency below 200 ms.
• Develop and maintain high-quality, production-ready code using Go or a comparable programming language, with the ability to ramp up quickly on Go.
• Design and implement comprehensive unit, integration, contract, and load testing strategies to validate system performance and service-level agreements.
• Build and manage CI/CD pipelines, automated deployments, blue-green and canary releases, and feature-flag mechanisms.
• Implement observability using structured logging, metrics, distributed tracing, dashboards, and alerting through tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, and OpenTelemetry.
• Troubleshoot production issues, participate in on-call rotations, conduct root-cause analysis, and drive corrective and preventive actions.
• Work with Kafka or similar event-streaming platforms, PostgreSQL, containerisation technologies, Kubernetes, and cloud infrastructure.
• Identify performance bottlenecks, optimise resource utilisation, and improve the scalability and resilience of backend services.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to translate business and technical requirements into robust engineering solutions.
• Conduct code reviews, mentor junior engineers, establish engineering best practices, and contribute to architectural and technical decisions.
• Leverage AI-assisted coding tools for development, testing, refactoring, and productivity while maintaining accountability for code quality, security, and reliability.

Requirements:

• 6-8 years of professional experience in backend software development, system design, and production engineering.
• At least 2 years of hands-on experience building or operating high-throughput backend services with strict latency and reliability requirements.
• Strong programming skills in Go or a comparable language such as Java, C++, or Rust, with the willingness to develop proficiency in Go.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems concepts, including consistency, availability, idempotency, retries, exponential backoff, dead-letter queues, eventual consistency, and fault tolerance.
• Hands-on experience with Kafka or similar message brokers and event-streaming platforms.
• Strong experience with PostgreSQL, relational database design, query optimisation, and transaction management.
• Experience deploying and operating containerised applications using Docker and Kubernetes.
• Working knowledge of at least one major cloud platform: AWS, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), or Microsoft Azure.
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, release management, and production deployment practices.
• Practical knowledge of observability tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, and structured logging.
• Strong problem-solving, debugging, system-design, and performance-optimisation skills.
• Experience owning backend services through the complete software development lifecycle, from architecture and development to deployment and production support.
• Ability to work independently, make sound technical decisions, and collaborate effectively with engineering teams.
• Experience using AI coding assistants responsibly, including reviewing and validating AI-generated code.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience with open networks and interoperable protocols such as BeCAN, UPI, or Account Aggregator.
• Exposure to API gateways, service meshes, and large-scale API management.
• Experience in payments, e-commerce, logistics, fintech, or other high-volume transaction-driven systems.
• Contributions to open-source projects, technical blogs, or engineering communities.
• Experience improving system reliability, reducing production incidents, and optimising latency and infrastructure costs.