Engineering Manager Backend
Location : Flexible / Hybrid (MonFri)
About The Role
SolarSquare is building the infrastructure for India's clean energy transition. We're looking for an Engineering Manager who doesn't just run a team someone who builds one from the ground up, makes consequential technical bets, and treats engineering outcomes as business outcomes.
You'll own the technical strategy and delivery for our full-stack platform, lead a growing team of SDE1SDE3 engineers, and work directly with product, design, and business to shape what we build and how fast we build it. This is a role for someone who has operated in resource-constrained environments, shipped systems that held up under pressure, and left every team they've led measurably better than they found it.
If you've only ever executed someone else's roadmap, this isn't the right fit. If you've ever built something from scratch and felt personally responsible for whether it worked.
What You'll Own
Team & Culture :
- Build, hire, and develop a high-performing full-stack engineering team including setting the bar for what high-performing means at SolarSquare
- Create genuine career growth paths for engineers.
- Maintain team health, retention, and motivation through periods of rapid change and ambiguity
Technical Strategy
- Define and drive the architectural roadmap
- Make and own technical bets: when to invest in platform, when to ship fast, when to pay down debt
- Establish observability, reliability, and security standards before they become production fires
Delivery
- Translate business goals into engineering priorities and push back when the translation is wrong
- Set clear goals, metrics, and delivery expectations; hold yourself and the team accountable to them
- Manage trade-offs between short-term product velocity and long-term engineering health
Cross-Functional Influence
- Partner with Product, Design, and Business stakeholders and influence decisions upstream.
- Communicate technical risk, cost, and complexity clearly to non-technical leadership
What We're Looking For
- 7- 10 years of engineering experience, with at least 3 years leading teams.
- Strong understanding of distributed systems design : idempotency, retries, DLQs, circuit breakers, eventual consistency, you've had to debug these in production.
- Proven experience with event-driven architecture and Kafka including schema design, consumer group management, and failure recovery patterns.
- Comfort with relational (PostgreSQL) and NoSQL (MongoDB, Redis, ) databases including query optimisation and schema design decisions at scale.
- You've designed or operated systems handling meaningful traffic ideally 10K+ RPS. significant daily transaction volumes, or consumer-scale user bases (1M+ users)
- You understand what 99.99% uptime actually costs to maintain and you've made the infrastructure and on call decisions to back it.
- You've written or enforced SLOs, SLAs, and incident management processes.
- You've done a postmortem that changed something real about how the team operates.
- Hands-on experience with AWS, GCP, or Azure beyond just deploying services, cost optimisation, right sizing, architecture decisions that meaningfully reduced spend
- Working knowledge of containerisation (Docker) and orchestration (Kubernetes) enough to unblock your team.
- CI/CD pipeline ownership you've built or significantly improved a pipeline.
- Experience with observability tooling: Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, ELK, or equivalent and more importantly, a philosophy about what to instrument and why
- You've made the call between monolith and microservices and you can defend it with context.
- You've managed technical debt consciously: triaged it, prioritised it, and made the case to stakeholders for when to pay it down
- You've navigated a hard conversation with a product or business stakeholder and changed the outcome
- Your engineers grow under you. You can point to people you've promoted, coached, or unblocked
- You know how to build alignment across functions where incentives don't naturally align
- You have clear examples of decisions you made under ambiguity and you can articulate the trade-offs you
weighed
- You've identified a systemic problem and fixed it without being asked
- You've built or rebuilt something that wasn't working a team, a process, a system
Work Arrangement
Flexible work setup, including hybrid options. Monday to Friday.
(ref:hirist.tech)
