Full-Time
- Bengaluru (On-site)
- Engineering Leadership
Experience: 9–15 years of backend engineering, including 3+ years in architecture roles
Scope: Cross-portfolio — hands-on architecture across 2–4 active Meraki Labs ventures
About Meraki Labs
Meraki Labs is at the forefront of India's deep-tech innovation landscape, operating as a dynamic
venture studio founded by visionary entrepreneur
Mukesh Bansal (Founder - Myntra, Cure Fit) and Peeyush Ranjan (Former Google VP and Flipkart CTO). Our mission is to build and rapidly scale AI-first, moonshot startups—transforming groundbreaking ideas into next-generation industry leaders. Through a hands-on, intensive partnership model, we work closely with exceptional founders, driving these ventures from concept to impact.
THE ROLE
As a Software Architect at Meraki Labs, you will be the technical backbone of our portfolio companies engineering efforts. You will own the end-to-end backend architecture across multiple ventures — from writing the first lines of infrastructure code to reviewing system designs at scale. You will work shoulder-to-shoulder with founders, product managers, and early engineering hires, making consequential decisions that shape companies for years.
This is a high-trust, high-autonomy role. You will be expected to operate independently, move fast without breaking things, and leave behind systems that teams can grow into — not just systems that work today.
What You'll Do
Architecture & System Design
- Design and own scalable, secure, and maintainable backend architectures for new ventures from greenfield to production
- Establish architectural patterns — microservices vs. monolith, event-driven design, API contracts — tailored to each company's stage and constraints
- Define data models, storage strategies, and caching layers; make principled decisions on SQL vs. NoSQL, relational vs. graph
- Conduct architecture reviews across portfolio companies, flagging technical debt early and proposing remediation paths
Platform & Infrastructure
- Build and standardize cloud-native infrastructure on AWS / GCP — Kubernetes, Terraform, CI/CD pipelines, secret management, and observability stacks
- Define SLOs, SLIs, and error budgets; implement reliability practices such as circuit breakers, retries, and graceful degradation
- Champion cost-efficient infrastructure decisions without sacrificing reliability or developer velocity
Engineering Leadership & Culture
- Partner with founders to make early technical hiring decisions — identifying the right profiles for each venture's stage
- Mentor early-career engineers embedded within portfolio companies, establishing coding standards, review practices, and engineering culture
- Translate ambiguous business requirements into clear technical specs; bridge the gap between product vision and execution reality
- Drive documentation discipline — RFCs, ADRs, runbooks — so engineering knowledge is never trapped in individual heads
Cross-Portfolio Leverage
- Identify shared infrastructure opportunities across portfolio companies — auth layers, payments, notifications, data pipelines — and build reusable internal tooling
- Stay current on emerging backend patterns, LLM integration paradigms, and developer tooling; introduce relevant innovations across the studio
What We're Looking For
Must-Haves
- 9–15 years of professional backend engineering experience, with demonstrable ownership of production systems
- 3+ years in an explicit architecture, tech lead, or principal engineer role — not just unofficial architecture work
- Deep proficiency in at least one strongly typed backend language (Python, Go, Java, Kotlin, or TypeScript/Node)
- Must have experience in prompt engineering for code generation, integrating AI tools into team workflows, and critically reviewing LLM output for correctness and architectural fit.
- Hands-on experience designing distributed systems — message queues (Kafka, RabbitMQ, SQS), event sourcing, CQRS, idempotency
- Proven track record with cloud-native infrastructure on AWS or GCP: ECS/EKS, RDS/Aurora, Redis, CDNs, IAM, and secrets management
- Strong command of API design — REST, GraphQL, gRPC — and the ability to reason about versioning, backwards compatibility, and consumer contracts
- Comfort operating in early-stage, ambiguous environments where requirements change and timelines are tight
- Setting team norms around AI-assisted development: when to use it, how to review AI-generated code, and coaching engineers to apply architectural judgment and security scrutiny before anything ships.
Strong-to-Have
- Experience at a startup studio, venture builder, or working across multiple products simultaneously
- Familiarity with AI/ML integration patterns — LLM APIs, vector databases, RAG pipelines, embedding workflows
- Prior experience establishing engineering processes from scratch: on-call rotations, incident response, sprint cadences
- Contributions to open-source infrastructure tooling or published writing on system design
What we offer
- Meaningful equity — we treat the architect role as a founding-adjacent position, and compensation reflects that
- Exposure to 2–4 early-stage companies simultaneously — the compacted learning of a decade in a few years
- Direct access to founders, investors, and domain experts across sectors
- Annual learning budget for conferences, courses, and books
The Recruiter for this role is Ritesh Kalvellu - [Confidential Information]. You can connect with him for queries about the role.
