Software Engineer Backend

Job Description:

About Us:

We are an early-stage startup moving fast to build something meaningful. Our team is small, our ambitions are large, and we give our engineers real ownership. You will not be a cog — you will be a key architect of what we build.

Role OverView:

We are looking for a Software Engineer with a minimum of 2 years of hands-on experience, who can own the backend end-to-end — from understanding business requirements all the way to designing, building, and deploying production systems. This role demands someone who is genuinely self-driven, technically broad, and comfortable making architectural decisions independently.

What matters is that you have done this hands-on, you understand the trade-offs, and you can ship.

What you will Own:

•   Understand product requirements and translate them into a concrete technical plan

•   Architect backend systems from scratch — services, APIs, data layers, and integrations

•   Design schemas that are clean, scalable, and maintainable

•   Build and document RESTful and GraphQL APIs consumed by frontends and external clients

•   Make decisions on distributed systems — queues, async processing, service boundaries

•   Choose and work across multiple databases, primarily PostgreSQL

•   Write solid, testable, production-ready code regardless of the tech stack

•   Set up and maintain CI/CD pipelines and AWS-based cloud infrastructure

•   Deploy and manage containerised workloads on Kubernetes; leverage Lambda and other AWS services

•   Collaborate on frontend work when needed — you should understand it even if you do not own it

•   Conduct code reviews and uphold engineering standards as the team grows

Technical Skills Requirements:

System Design Architect full systems independently — think in components, boundaries, trade-offs, and failure modes

Schema Design Design normalised, efficient database schemas; understand indexing, relationships, and migrations

API Design RESTful and GraphQL API design — versioning, auth, error handling, contract-first thinking

Distributed Systems Queues, async jobs, eventual consistency, idempotency, rate limiting, retries

DSA Strong fundamentals — reason about time/space complexity and apply the right data structures

PostgreSQL Deep hands-on experience — queries, indexes, transactions, EXPLAIN plans, performance tuning

Tech-Stack Agnostic Have a preferred stack but can pick up new languages and frameworks as the problem demands

Frontend (Working) Understand components, state, and API contracts well enough to collaborate effectively

AWS EC2, RDS, S3, SQS, SNS, Lambda, API Gateway, CloudWatch — hands-on production experience

CI/CD Build and maintain pipelines — GitHub Actions, CodePipeline, or equivalent

Kubernetes (K8s) Deploy, manage, and troubleshoot containerised services in a K8s cluster

Requirement Analysis Break vague requirements into tasks, flag ambiguities, estimate, and plan delivery

What We offer:

•   Full ownership — you will architect, decide, and ship

•   Direct impact — your work will be visible in everything the company does

•   Competitive compensation based on demonstrated skills and ability

•   A chance to shape the engineering culture as the team grows

Budget: 7.2 LPA-9 LPA

Experience 3-5 Years

Due to the high volume of applications we receive, only candidates who complete all application requirements will be considered for further evaluation.

Please answer the three questions provided in the next section and submit your responses in a separate Word document. Attach this document along with your resume when applying for this position.

Important:

• Responses must be submitted in a separate Word document.
• The response document must be attached together with your resume.
• Only candidates who submit both the resume and the completed response document will be shortlisted for the next stage of the selection process.

Applications that do not include all required submissions will be automatically filtered out and will not be considered further.

Question 1- System Design Prompt

Design a real-time notification system for a food delivery platform. The system must notify customers (order placed, out for delivery, delivered), delivery partners (new order assigned, route updates), and restaurant staff (new order received, preparation deadline alerts). The platform has 500,000 active users and must deliver notifications via push (mobile), SMS, and in-app — reliably, even under traffic spikes during peak meal hours.

In your 400–600 word response, cover:

1.  Overall architecture — services, components, and how they communicate

2.  How you ensure a notification is never lost, even if a downstream channel (SMS, push) is temporarily unavailable

3.  Database and queue design to handle high-throughput, time-sensitive delivery

4.  How you handle peak-hour traffic spikes without degrading reliability

5.  Trade-offs you are consciously making and why

Question 2 — PostgreSQL Performance

You have a PostgreSQL table with 50 million rows. A query that used to run in 200ms now takes 12 seconds after a recent data growth spike. Walk through exactly how you diagnose and fix this. What do you check first, what are the most likely causes, and what would your fix look like

Question 3 — AWS & Distributed Reliability

You are building an order processing flow on AWS. When a customer places an order, the system must: deduct inventory, charge the customer, and send a confirmation email — all reliably, without any step silently failing. The charge and inventory services are third-party and occasionally go down. How do you design this on AWS so that partial failures are handled correctly and no order is ever lost or double-processed