About Porter
Porter is building the operating system for intra-city logistics in India. With 20 million orders per month, 500K+ daily-active drivers, and rapid scale ahead (1.5x growth expected next year), we solve complex real-world problems at massive scale, balancing speed, reliability, and cost efficiency in a highly operational environment.
Role Overview
High-Ownership Engineer | Scalable Systems Builder | Future System Leader
As an SDE-2 at Porter, you are a core builder of production systems at scale. You don't just ship features — you build durable, reliable components that power millions of real-world transactions.
You are trusted with:
- Owning meaningful system components
- Designing robust solutions to non-trivial problems
- Making engineering trade-offs with business context
- Raising the quality bar of the codebase
This role is about strong independent ownership with growing system influence.
You are expected to think beyond tasks — toward reliability, scale, performance, and user impact.
Key Responsibilities
Design & Build at Scale
- Design and implement scalable services and modules within large distributed systems.
- Drive Low-Level Design independently and contribute meaningfully to High-Level Design discussions.
- Perform performance analysis and reason about scale, failure modes, and trade-offs.
- Build systems that are reliable, observable, and cost-aware.
- Write code that stands the test of time — modular, extensible, production-ready.
This is not feature execution — this is system construction.
Own Critical Components
- Own services or subsystems end-to-end — from design to production to operational excellence.
- Be accountable for uptime, performance, and maintainability of owned systems.
- Actively improve monitoring, alerting, and operational hygiene.
- Lead root cause analysis and implement preventive fixes.
Ownership here means technical accountability, not task completion.
Engineering Excellence
- Apply strong fundamentals in data structures, algorithms, and system design.
- Leverage AI tools to accelerate development while validating outputs rigorously.
- Anticipate edge cases and design for real-world chaos (load spikes, partial failures, latency constraints).
- Raise the quality bar in code reviews and engineering discussions.
Business & Product Impact
- Understand how your systems affect driver experience, customer reliability, and cost efficiency.
- Make trade-offs that balance speed, reliability, and frugality.
- Use metrics to evaluate the success of your systems.
You are not just solving engineering problems — you are solving business problems through engineering.
Team Impact
- Mentor SDE-1s and help them ramp faster.
- Influence code quality standards within your pod.
- Collaborate effectively with Product, Data, and Operations.
- Proactively surface risks and suggest improvements.
You are a pillar of your pod's execution strength.
What We're Looking For
Experience
- 2–5 years of software development experience.
- Experience shipping production systems.
- Exposure to distributed systems or backend services at scale.
- Experience working in fast-paced, high-ownership environments (startups or scale-ups preferred).
Technical Skills
- Strong fundamentals in data structures, algorithms, and object-oriented design.
- Familiarity with modern backend stacks, distributed systems, and cloud infrastructure.
- Strong understanding of engineering operations: monitoring, alerting, reliability, and performance tuning.
AI & First-Principles Thinking
- Ability to use AI as a productivity tool, not a crutch.
- Strong judgment to validate AI-generated outputs and reason independently.
- Comfortable breaking down complex problems to fundamentals rather than pattern-matching solutions.
Leadership & Mindset
- Strong sense of ownership and accountability (Own It).
- User-first thinking with an understanding of business impact (User Obsession).
- Bias for action and execution in ambiguous situations (Keep Moving).
- Collaborative, empathetic, and resilient under pressure.
- Desire to raise the bar for talent, quality, and execution.
Why Join Porter
- Build systems that operate at massive real-world scale.
- Solve unique logistics and operational challenges.
- Work in a culture that values ownership, frugality, speed, and impact.
- Significant scope to grow beyond SDE 2 into technical or leadership paths.
