About Pocket FM
Pocket FM is a leading audio entertainment platform focused on immersive, long-form audio storytelling. The platform offers episodic audio series across genres such as romance, drama, thriller, and fantasy. Pocket FM follows a mobile-first approach, enabling users to listen anytime and anywhere. Founded in India, the company has expanded rapidly across global markets, including the US.It supports multiple regional and international languages to reach a diverse audience. Pocket FM empowers creators through a strong content and monetization ecosystem
Introduction:
We are seeking a Staff Engineer to join Pocket FM's engineering organization for the Monetisation Team. As a key member of our team, your deep expertise in design and architecture will drive the scaling of our technology that powers industry-defining mobile applications, catering to millions of audio lovers throughout the world. The ideal candidate will have a strong background in backend development and cloud technologies, contributing to the design and implementation of scalable solutions. You will own the architecture and evolution of the Monetisation Services, which is the core to Pocket FM's business.
Key Responsibilities:
Own the Core Monetisation Platform
- Architect, build, and evolve the core monetisation systems that power billing, subscriptions, pricing, and revenue flows.
- Ensure high availability, strong consistency, performance, and fault tolerance across critical revenue paths.
Drive System Scalability & Reliability
- Design for scale to support rapid business growth, traffic spikes, and new monetisation models.
- Improve system reliability through resilient architecture patterns, redundancy, and graceful degradation strategies.
Lead Platform Decoupling & Service Decomposition
- Break down tightly coupled legacy systems into well-defined, scalable, and maintainable services.
- Define clear service boundaries, APIs, and ownership models to enable autonomous development across teams.
Re-architect for Long-Term Sustainability
- Identify architectural bottlenecks and technical debt in existing systems.
- Redesign key components to improve robustness, extensibility, and business agility.
Advance Observability & Operational Excellence
- Improve logging, metrics, tracing, and alerting across monetisation services.
- Drive adoption of monitoring standards and SLO-driven engineering to ensure production health and faster incident resolution.
Champion Engineering Best Practices
- Establish and promote standards for backend architecture, service design, scalability, and performance optimization.
- Advocate for security, compliance, and data integrity within monetisation workflows.
Influence Organisation-Level Technical Initiatives
- Lead cross-team initiatives to standardise patterns, frameworks, and reliability practices.
- Drive alignment across multiple teams to adopt scalable architectural principles.
Provide Technical Leadership & Mentorship
- Guide senior engineers and teams on design reviews, complex problem-solving, and system trade-offs.
- Foster a culture of ownership, technical excellence, and operational accountability.
Requirements:
- 9+ years of experience in building scalable web services.
- Expertise in Python or Golang, with 4-5 years of recent experience building large-scale web applications capable of handling thousands of transactions per second (TPS).
- Strong working experience in synchronous and asynchronous web application frameworks in Python or Golang.
- Strong experience in microservices design patterns and proven expertise in re-architecting monolithic systems into Python/Golang-based microservices.
- Demonstrated experience in distributed systems and cloud-native technologies.
- Strong understanding of SQL databases like MySQL or PostgreSQL and NoSQL databases like Cassandra, ScyllaDB, MongoDB, or CouchDB.
- Experience with message brokers, caching, and search technologies like Kafka/RabbitMQ, Redis/Memcached, and Elasticsearch.
- Strong understanding of core computer science concepts, Linux, networking, data structures, and algorithms.
- Demonstrated leadership experience, including mentoring junior engineers and driving technical initiatives within teams.
- Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or a related technical discipline.
