We're looking for a staff engineer to be a technical anchor on our backend engineering team. This is a deeply hands-on role; the large majority of your time will be spent designing and building high-performance distributed systems, data pipelines, and AI serving infrastructure. Alongside that, you'll provide technical mentorship, lead project execution, and contribute to architectural decisions that shape how the team builds and operates at scale. You won't be managing headcount or running performance cycles. But you will be expected to raise the engineering bar around you through design reviews, pairing, and setting a standard others can learn from.
The Candidate Will Have Responsibilities Across The Following Functions
Engineering (80%):
- Design and build scalable backend services and APIs supporting our AI product suite.
- Own the architecture of high-throughput, low-latency distributed systems for real-time data processing.
- Build and maintain data ingestion, transformation, and aggregation pipelines with emphasis on fault tolerance and scalability.
- Drive database design and optimisation for high-concurrency workloads.
- Implement and evolve observability infrastructure logging, metrics, and alerting to ensure reliability and fast incident resolution.
- Set technical direction for microservices architecture: service boundaries, API contracts, caching strategies, and load balancing patterns.
Technical Leadership (20%):
- Lead design reviews and provide architectural guidance on the team's most complex problems.
- Mentor engineers through code reviews, pairing, and design feedback focused on building long-term engineering capability, not just shipping the current sprint.
- Translate ambiguous product and research requirements into concrete, scoped engineering plans.
- Collaborate with the Head of Engineering and peer leads on architectural standards and cross-team technical decisions.
- Be the person who steps up to the hardest problems, not just to solve them, but to bring others along.
Required
The core requirements for the job include the following:
- 8+ years of backend engineering, with deep experience in distributed systems, high-scale data infrastructure, or AI/ML serving.
- Hands-on proficiency in one or more of the following: Python, Java, Go, and C++.
- A track record of owning large, complex systems end-to-end from design through production operation.
- Ability to communicate technical decisions clearly in design docs, in reviews, and in conversation with non-engineers.
Strongly Preferred
- Experience with AI/ML infrastructure: model serving, inference pipelines, training infrastructure, or feature stores.
- Background in streaming and batch data systems (Kafka, Spark, Flink, or equivalents).
- Cloud-native infrastructure experience (AWS/GCP/Azure, Kubernetes, managed data services).
- Prior experience as a tech lead, senior IC, or informal mentor: you've helped engineers around you grow, even without a formal management title.
This job was posted by Aditya Rachakonda from Minivet AI Labs (A Flipkart Group Company).
