Engineering Team Lead

Tech Lead / Senior Backend Engineer

6+ Years

We at Setu are looking for those who share our core belief - Every Day is Game Day. We bring our best selves to work each day to realize our mission of enriching the world through the power of digital commerce and financial services.

Role Purpose:

We are looking for a strong backend engineer with lead-level ownership to join the BBPS engineering team. This role will own critical parts of our BBPS stack across BOU and COU systems, drive technical design, guide implementation, and help the team deliver reliably across live partner and bank integrations. This is a high-ownership role for someone who is comfortable working in production-heavy systems, navigating ambiguity in external integrations, and balancing delivery, quality, and operational reliability. The role also requires strong openness to the fast-changing AI ecosystem, with the ability to identify how products, workflows, and engineering systems should evolve to become more AI-friendly over time.

What will you do at Setu

• Own and drive backend engineering for core BBPS systems across BOU and COU flows.
• Translate product and business requirements into technical plans, designs, and implementation milestones.
• Lead design discussions on APIs, workflows, data models, retries, idempotency, and failure handling.
• Build and review production-grade services and integrations with strong focus on reliability and maintainability.
• Handle complex production issues, support escalations, and deep debugging across logs, dashboards, traces, and database state.
• Work closely with Product, Solutions, Business, and Operations teams on technical clarifications and delivery planning.
• Mentor engineers through code reviews, design reviews, and execution guidance.
• Improve observability, engineering quality, and operational practices over time.
• Help shape BBPS systems and workflows to be more AI-friendly from both product and engineering perspectives.
• Identify opportunities to improve developer productivity, debugging, support workflows, and product capabilities using AI-native or AI-assisted approaches.
• Ensure new systems and improvements are designed with future AI-assisted operations, support, and product use cases in mind.

What We Are Looking For

• 6 to 10 years of backend engineering experience, with clear ownership of production systems. Strong experience designing and building API-heavy distributed systems.
• Strong fundamentals in databases, data modeling, and SQL.
• Solid debugging skills across application, infra, and data layers.
• Experience working with external integrations, unclear specs, and cross-functional dependencies. Ability to break down ambiguous problems and move execution forward with good engineering judgment.
• Experience reviewing code, guiding engineers, and raising the quality bar for the team.
• Comfort operating in systems where delivery, support, and stakeholder communication all matter. Strong awareness of the current AI ecosystem and willingness to adapt quickly as tools and patterns evolve.
• Ability to think beyond traditional backend delivery and evaluate how systems should be designed to work well with AI-assisted development, support, and operations.
• Practical curiosity about applying AI to engineering productivity, product capabilities, and operational workflows.

Must-Have Skills:

• Backend development experience in one or more strongly typed or systems-oriented languages. Experience with relational databases and production data workflows.
• Experience with async systems, queues, retries, and failure recovery patterns.
• Production debugging and incident handling experience.
• System design skills with practical trade-off thinking.
• Strong communication and stakeholder-management ability.
• Demonstrated ability to adapt to major tooling and ecosystem shifts, especially in AI-assisted engineering workflows.
• Strong learning agility and comfort evaluating new tools, workflows, and technical patterns.

Good To Have

• Experience in payments, fintech, banking, or compliance-heavy domains.
• Exposure to NPCI-style or bank-side integrations.
• Experience with cloud infrastructure, observability stacks, and operational tooling.
• Experience mentoring a small engineering team or acting as technical lead on a business-critical system.
• Hands-on exposure to AI-assisted developer tools, agentic workflows, or LLM-driven productivity systems.
• Experience designing systems or workflows that are easier to debug, automate, or operate using AI tooling.

What Success Looks Like

Within the first few months, the person in this role should be able to take technical ownership of key BBPS modules, guide engineers on delivery and design, improve execution predictability on integration-heavy work, raise confidence in handling production and partner-facing technical issues, and identify practical opportunities to make the BBPS stack and team workflows more AI-friendly.

Why This Role Matters

BBPS is a business-critical area with multiple live partner and bank integrations, ongoing roadmap commitments, and significant production responsibility. This role is important to ensure continuity in technical ownership, strong execution on integrations and support-heavy workflows, and long-term engineering quality in a high-impact product line.

Why Setu

We will spare no efforts to ensure that Setu empowers you to do the most important and impactful work of your career—

• Opportunity to work closely with the founding team who built and scaled public infrastructure such as UPI, GST, Aadhaar, etc.

We care deeply about your growth. So we work hard to provide you with—

• A fully stocked library and unlimited book budget.
• Tickets to conferences and industry events.
• Learning sessions where we invite both team members and external experts to teach you something new.
• Learning and development allowance that gives access to subscriptions, courses, certifications, music classes, and much more. Grow, learn, and improve with Setu!
• Kick-ass benefits include comprehensive health insurance for you and your family, personal accident and term life insurance, access to mental health counsellors, extraordinary coffee, and a beautiful office with lots of solid wood and natural light.
• We work hard to make sure our team is diverse and varied. We interview and hire purely on merit, skill, and competence—everything else is irrelevant.

Our core DNA:

Our culture code—How We Move, defines the behaviours we expect from our people. When you display any of the six culture code elements, you demonstrate Every Day is Game Day. The six elements of our culture code—

• Take the shot: You decide fast and deliver right.
• Sign your work like an artist: You master what you do and take pride in it.
• Be the Sherpa: You lead your crew on every expedition.
• Be the CEO of what you do: You own it and make things happen.
• Care with tough love: You empower others with trust, respect, and openness.
• Own tomorrow: You innovate for the customer and beyond.

Join us if you want to be part of a company that's building infrastructure that will directly impact financial inclusion and improve millions of lives. No cashbacks, no growth-hacks, no gimmicks. Just an audacious mission, and an obsession with craftsmanship in code.