Software Engineer - Backend

About the company :

This is a profitable, venture-backed startup that builds a unified API for HR, payroll, ATS, and benefits systems. Instead of integrating separately with dozens of HR and payroll platforms, customers integrate once with this platform. The company supports 65+ HR and payroll systems and processes over 100,000 syncs a day. It works with established players in the HR-tech and benefits space. The business is profitable and is growing 5 to 6 times year-over-year.

What this role really is :

This role is centered on Python, FastAPI, and Postgres. The backend team is small, so this is not a sub-component of a sub-component. The engineer owns integrations end-to-end. If the company signs a customer who needs a new connector, for example Paycor, the engineer builds it, writes its tests, ships it to production, and is on-call when it breaks.

Some weeks involve writing connector code. Some weeks involve debugging a race condition in the worker pool. Some weeks involve joining a call with a customer's engineering team to help them understand an integration issue. The role is wider than it sounds.

First six months, roughly :

- Month 1 : Onboard. Ship one small fix to production in week one. Read the codebase. Understand how connectors are tested.

- Month 2 : Take ownership of the first integration, likely a payroll connector that has not yet been built.

- Month 3 : Ship it to a paying customer and join the implementation call.

- Months 4 to 6 : Take on two more integrations and complete the first on-call rotation. Start contributing to shared infrastructure such as the auth layer, the rate-limit handler, and the sync orchestrator.

This ramp is intentionally fast. Candidates who find it energizing rather than intimidating are the right fit.

Who you are :

- You have 2 to 5 years of experience writing production Python. FastAPI experience is ideal, and candidates with Flask or Django experience who can pick up FastAPI quickly are also a good fit.

- You have experience running Postgres in production, and you understand indexes and deadlocks, and you have debugged slow queries caused by missing WHERE clauses.

- You read other people's APIs critically and have opinions on good API design, including how pagination should work.

- You write commits and pull requests that explain your reasoning, not just the changes you made.

- You are comfortable debugging unfamiliar systems. The company integrates with 65+ external APIs, many of which have poor documentation, so reading network traces and reverse-engineering undocumented behavior is a regular part of the job.

Who you are not :

- You are not someone who wants a clear ticket queue and a manager assigning work, since this team expects engineers to find work and run with it.

- You are not someone who needs a perfect spec before starting. Specs exist here but are often wrong, and the expectation is to ship, learn, and revise as you go.

- You are not someone who sees integration work as less interesting engineering. Moving the right data to the right place at the right time with the right guarantees is genuinely hard and valuable engineering work.

The offer :

- Cash : Cash compensation is competitive for the Indian market and is indexed to what you would expect from a well-funded mid-stage startup. The company is profitable and pays real cash compensation rather than relying mainly on equity.

- Equity : Meaningful ESOPs with a 4-year vesting schedule and a 1-year cliff.

- Location : Based in Bengaluru, HSR Layout. Relocation support is available for candidates moving cities.

- Equipment : A MacBook Pro of your choice along with any other equipment you need.

- Health : Health insurance for the employee and their dependents.

Skills

Backend Architecture, Python, FastAPI, PostgreSQL, Django, Flask