Tarlan

About the company

This is a profitable, venture-backed startup that builds a unified API for HR, payroll, ATS, and benefits systems. Instead of integrating separately with dozens of HR and payroll platforms, customers integrate once with this platform. The company supports 65+ HR and payroll systems and processes over 100,000 syncs a day. It works with established players in the HR-tech and benefits space. The business is profitable and is growing 5 to 6 times year-over-year.

What this role really is

This role is centered on Python, FastAPI, and Postgres. The backend team is small, so this is not a sub-component of a sub-component. The engineer owns integrations end-to-end. If the company signs a customer who needs a new connector, for example Paycor, the engineer builds it, writes its tests, ships it to production, and is on-call when it breaks.

Some weeks involve writing connector code. Some weeks involve debugging a race condition in the worker pool. Some weeks involve joining a call with a customer's engineering team to help them understand an integration issue. The role is wider than it sounds.

First six months, roughly

• Month 1: Onboard. Ship one small fix to production in week one. Read the codebase. Understand how connectors are tested.
• Month 2: Take ownership of the first integration, likely a payroll connector that has not yet been built.
• Month 3: Ship it to a paying customer and join the implementation call.
• Months 4 to 6: Take on two more integrations and complete the first on-call rotation. Start contributing to shared infrastructure such as the auth layer, the rate-limit handler, and the sync orchestrator.

This ramp is intentionally fast. Candidates who find it energizing rather than intimidating are the right fit.

Who you are

• You have 2 to 5 years of experience writing production Python. FastAPI experience is ideal, and candidates with Flask or Django experience who can pick up FastAPI quickly are also a good fit.
• You have experience running Postgres in production, and you understand indexes and deadlocks, and you have debugged slow queries caused by missing WHERE clauses.
• You read other people's APIs critically and have opinions on good API design, including how pagination should work.
• You write commits and pull requests that explain your reasoning, not just the changes you made.
• You are comfortable debugging unfamiliar systems. The company integrates with 65+ external APIs, many of which have poor documentation, so reading network traces and reverse-engineering undocumented behavior is a regular part of the job.

Who you are not

• You are not someone who wants a clear ticket queue and a manager assigning work, since this team expects engineers to find work and run with it.
• You are not someone who needs a perfect spec before starting. Specs exist here but are often wrong, and the expectation is to ship, learn, and revise as you go.
• You are not someone who sees integration work as less interesting engineering. Moving the right data to the right place at the right time with the right guarantees is genuinely hard and valuable engineering work.

The offer

• Cash: Cash compensation is competitive for the Indian market and is indexed to what you would expect from a well-funded mid-stage startup. The company is profitable and pays real cash compensation rather than relying mainly on equity.
• Equity: Meaningful ESOPs with a 4-year vesting schedule and a 1-year cliff.
• Location: Based in Bengaluru, HSR Layout. Relocation support is available for candidates moving cities.
• Equipment: A MacBook Pro of your choice along with any other equipment you need.
• Health: Health insurance for the employee and their dependents.

Please apply here: https://tarlan.ai/apply/bnd-eng-3m9p

About the company

A profitable, venture-backed startup building B2B API infrastructure for the HR and people operations ecosystem. The platform provides a unified integration layer across HR, payroll, benefits, and related systems, helping software companies connect to and manage these integrations without building them individually.

The company serves mid-market and enterprise customers, including organizations in regulated industries, and is looking to hire a senior engineer who can act as a second technical owner alongside the CTO.

What's broken or missing that we need help with

• Write APIs: The platform already supports read operations across a large number of systems. Write APIs are where the real complexity lies: payroll deductions, employee creation, benefits enrollment, and other critical workflows. Every write API is part research project (understanding undocumented behavior) and part reliability problem (idempotency, retries, partial failures). We need someone who can own this surface end-to-end.
• On-prem deployments: Enterprise customers need the platform deployed within their own VPC or infrastructure environments. One such deployment has already been completed. We now need a clean, repeatable pattern that can scale across future customers.
• Hiring: You'll play a significant role in interviewing engineering candidates over the next 12 months. The quality of the next set of hires will have a meaningful impact on the future of the engineering organization.

What this role really is

• This is a senior IC role with leverage, not a manager role.
• You'll spend most days writing code, but the code you write should remove constraints for the rest of the team rather than simply close tickets.
• You'll serve as a second opinion on difficult design decisions, a code reviewer who raises the engineering bar, and someone engineers can escalate to when they're stuck.
• You'll also take on responsibilities that occasionally overlap with leadership work: interviewing, mentoring, and helping resolve technical disagreements, but as a peer and technical leader rather than a people manager.

Your first six months, roughly

• Month 1: Onboard deeply. Read the codebase. Participate in architecture discussions. Focus on understanding before changing things.
• Months 2–3: Pick one of the key problem areas above, most likely Write APIs. Own it. Propose a plan, get buy-in, and begin execution.
• Month 4: Start running the senior side of the interview process. Help hire at least one engineer this quarter.
• Months 5–6: Ship meaningful infrastructure work. Participate in one on-call rotation per month. Become a second voice on architecture decisions that span multiple teams.

Who you are

• 5–8 years of production engineering experience
• Deep expertise in Python and Postgres
• FastAPI ideal
• You've built and operated systems that handle real load. Not Twitter scale, but real customers losing real money when things break.
• You've worked at a startup before and know how to ship without every safety net in place
• You've designed APIs that other engineers consume and can clearly explain technical trade-offs
• You've mentored both junior and senior engineers and know how to give feedback that lands
• You're calm under pressure

Who you are not

• A people manager looking to return to IC work as a temporary stop. This role is intended for someone who wants to remain deeply technical.
• An architect who prefers design discussions over writing production code. The role is hands-on.
• Someone whose experience has been exclusively in large technology companies. If you've never worked in an environment where customer context is highly visible, the transition may require adjustment.
• Someone who needs every problem to be greenfield. You'll spend meaningful time working within an existing codebase and improving systems you didn't originally build.

The Offer

• Cash: Competitive compensation for a profitable startup at this stage.
• Equity: ESOPs with a 4-year vesting schedule and 1-year cliff.
• Location: Bengaluru. Relocation support available.
• Reporting: Directly to the CTO with a close working relationship.
• Equipment & health: MacBook Pro and dependent health insurance.

Please apply here: https://tarlan.ai/apply