Lead Software Engineer

About the Role:

A Lead Software Development Engineer (Lead SDE) at Razorpay is a well-grounded, innovative, quality-focused product thinker and business-conscious engineer - not a mere coder. Armed with deep technical context and extensive experience, you will build production-grade, highly scalable software and see nuances and edge cases that others might overlook.

At our scale, engineering creates a massive impact across global digital payments. Beyond technical excellence, you are expected to operate with a strong ownership mindset in ambiguous environments, act as a technical leader, mentor peers, and actively influence and shape Razorpay's culture in the right way.

What you will build:

• Architecture & Design Thinking: Drive ambiguous requirements into clean, low-level designs (LLD) with clear interfaces, data flows, and non-functional requirements (NFRs) before execution.
• Engineering Leadership & AI Augmentation: Act as the tech lead of an AI agent loop. Lead development by utilizing AI-augmented workflows and engineering assistants strategically—handling prompt decomposition, constraint management, and rigorous code validation.
• Scalable Systems Delivery: Build full-fledged applications and payment infrastructure from scratch, driving features to completion. Transition systems seamlessly across complex architectural scales.
• Code Quality & Integrity: Maintain high-quality implementation standards with clean abstractions, SOLID principles, and modular, maintainable code. Take full ownership of all code codebases, performing independent navigation, debugging, and strict verification without AI assistance when required.
• Product & API Strategy: Actively participate in and drive product and design discussions. Shape our public-facing REST APIs for developers worldwide and brainstorm new directions to make online payments easy and accessible.
• Robust Testing & Resilience: Implement comprehensive verification strategies—including unit, integration, adversarial, and known-risk testing—to ensure error-free functionality under multi-limit and distributed failure modes.
• Collaboration & Mentorship: Mentorship of engineering peers, clearly articulating technical trade-offs, defending architectural decisions, and engaging in constructive discussions across teams to prioritise end-user value.

What we are looking for:

• 5+ years of experience in professional software technology, preferably within a fast-paced product company.
• Expert working knowledge and deep fluency in at least one backend programming language (e.g., GoLang, Java, Python).
• Strong grasp of both High-Level Design and Low-Level Design. Proven understanding of distributed systems fundamentals, data storage trade-offs caching, and event-driven architectures.
• Resiliency Patterns: Solid understanding of system failure modes and modern mitigation patterns.
• Familiarity with Agentic Workflows. Ability to break complex engineering problems down into structured, promptable tasks while maintaining complete accountability for code safety, security gaps, and hallucination detection.
• Understanding of web architectures, HTTP protocols, and REST API conventions.
• Demonstrated ability to challenge the status quo, evaluate complex technical trade-offs rationally, and display immense agility when iterating on products at scale.
• A strong willingness to learn and unlearn new technologies to deliver the best possible product outcome.