Team Lead - Messaging APIs

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Experience: 4+ yrs

Location: Bengaluru, Karnataka, India

Job Type: Full-time

We are looking for a hands-on Engineering Lead to lead the development of high-throughput messaging platforms and APIs supporting large-scale communication across multiple channels, including SMS, MMS, WhatsApp, RCS, and verification services.

The role combines hands-on software development, architecture, technical leadership, and mentoring, with a strong emphasis on building reliable distributed systems capable of processing very high message volumes. The ideal candidate will spend significant time coding and designing systems while providing technical direction and mentoring to a team of engineers.

Requirements

Key Responsibilities

• Design and develop high-throughput messaging pipelines covering API ingestion, routing, queuing, rate limiting, retries, and delivery receipt processing.
• Build scalable and highly available backend services using Python or Golang, with strong consideration for concurrency and performance.
• Design and maintain carrier and messaging aggregator integrations using SMPP and HTTP.
• Implement intelligent routing, failover mechanisms, delivery-quality monitoring, and traffic optimisation.
• Develop asynchronous messaging infrastructure using Kafka, SQS, RabbitMQ, or similar technologies.
• Design reliable systems using idempotency, backpressure, rate limiting, retry strategies, and fault-tolerant patterns.
• Establish technical direction through architecture reviews, system design discussions, service contracts, and engineering standards.
• Own production reliability, including SLOs, observability, alerting, capacity planning, on-call readiness, troubleshooting, and root-cause analysis.
• Build messaging capabilities that support regulatory and carrier requirements such as 10DLC, toll-free messaging, DLT, sender IDs, and opt-out handling.
• Develop mechanisms to maintain traffic quality and protect messaging infrastructure against spam, abuse, fraud, and SMS pumping.
• Work with databases such as PostgreSQL or MySQL, along with caching and NoSQL technologies such as Redis or DynamoDB.
• Design and operate cloud-native services using AWS, containers, and modern deployment practices.
• Participate in code and design reviews while maintaining high standards for scalability, reliability, security, and maintainability.
• Mentor and guide 3-5 engineers, supporting their technical growth through regular feedback, architecture discussions, and collaborative problem-solving.
• Lead or contribute to complex production incidents and ensure effective remediation and preventive improvements.

What Makes You a Great Fit

• 4-7 years of experience building large-scale distributed backend systems, with demonstrated technical leadership or mentoring experience.
• Strong proficiency in Python or Golang; strong Java or Node.js experience may also be considered.
• Proven experience designing RESTful APIs, high-throughput microservices, distributed systems, and highly available services.
• Strong understanding of asynchronous messaging systems such as Kafka, Amazon SQS, RabbitMQ, or equivalent platforms.
• Hands-on understanding of concurrency, idempotency, backpressure, rate limiting, retries, and fault tolerance.
• Strong experience with PostgreSQL or MySQL, with exposure to Redis, DynamoDB, or other caching/NoSQL technologies.
• Practical experience with AWS, including services such as EC2, S3, RDS, SQS, ECS, and Lambda.
• Experience with Docker/containerised deployments, Git, and at least one modern CI/CD platform.
• Strong production ownership, including observability, monitoring, distributed tracing, live-system debugging, incident management, and on-call practices.
• Strong system-design and architecture skills with the ability to make pragmatic decisions for high-scale environments.
• Excellent technical communication and collaboration skills.
• Demonstrated ability to mentor engineers and provide effective technical guidance.
• Experience in CPaaS, telecom, or A2P messaging is an advantage.
• Knowledge of SMPP, WhatsApp Business API, RCS, 10DLC, DLT, least-cost routing, deliverability analytics, fraud detection, or traffic-quality systems is highly desirable.