Engineering Manager

Strong Engineering Manager / Lead Profiles

2

Mandatory (Experience 1) – Must have minimum 8+ years of overall Software Engineering / Development experience with a strong IC foundation.

3

Mandatory (Experience 2) – Must have 2+ years of formal Engineering Manager experience with direct people-management responsibility (informal Senior Engineer / Tech Lead experience managing a team does not count)

4

Mandatory (Experience 3) – Must have directly managed 4–6+ engineers, including 1:1s, performance management, growth plans, promotions, mentoring, and team development.

5

Mandatory (Experience 4) – Must own technical direction and delivery for an engineering team/pod, including architecture, system design, code/PR reviews, execution planning, and engineering quality.

6

Mandatory (Experience 5) – Must have strong backend/software engineering experience with hands-on technical depth in building APIs, services, integrations, and scalable systems; specific language/framework can vary.

7

Mandatory (Experience 6) – Must have experience owning production operations, including on-call, incident management, debugging, and postmortems for their area.

8

Mandatory (Experience 7) – Must have experience driving cross-functional alignment with Product and Design and translating ambiguous business/product requirements into scalable technical solutions.

9

Mandatory (Company) – Must be from a Product Company / Startup, particularly B2B SaaS, Fintech, Payments, or similar technology product environments. (Refer Target Company List)

10

Mandatory (Role Fit) – Role is 80% people/team management and 20% technical/IC involvement;

11

Preferred (Education) - Tier 1 engineering college

Engineering Manager – Backend 

Location: Flexible / Hybrid (Mon–Fri)

Website: https://www.solarsquare.in

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 SDE1–SDE3 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. Learn more about us at https://www.solarsquare.in.

Key Responsibilities:

Team Leadership and Management:

• Lead, mentor, and manage a team of backend developers, fostering a culture of collaboration, innovation, and technical excellence.
• Promote a shared vision for the team, ensuring alignment with business goals and organizational objectives.
• Conduct performance reviews, provide constructive feedback, and create opportunities for team members’ professional growth.
• Drive cross-functional collaboration between development teams, designers, and product managers to deliver seamless and high-quality software.

Technical Strategy and Execution:

• Define and drive architectural decisions for both backend and frontend systems,ensuring scalability, reliability, and performance.
• Advocate and implement best practices in software development, including coding standards, test-driven development (TDD), and peer code reviews.
• Encourage the adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs) and AI-driven tools to optimize development and testing workflows.
• Provide technical direction on backend development using modern frameworks and languages, as well as frontend development using React, Angular, or Svelte.

Process and Quality Management:

• Ensure robust integration between backend APIs and frontend systems for seamless user experiences.
• Establish and enforce coding, testing, and deployment standards for both backend and frontend teams.
• Implement and optimize automated testing frameworks for backend and UI layers to ensure comprehensive coverage.
• Monitor system performance and application stability, proactively identifying and mitigating risks.
• Establish CI/CD pipelines and DevOps best practices for efficient and reliable delivery cycles.

Stakeholder Collaboration:

• Act as a bridge between engineering teams, business stakeholders, and leadership, ensuring effective communication and alignment.
• Translate complex business requirements into actionable technical solutions and guide teams through their implementation.
• Provide regular updates on progress, challenges, and innovations to stakeholders.

Innovation and Exploration:

• Stay updated on advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) and integrate them into development and quality assurance workflows where applicable.
• Encourage the exploration of cutting-edge technologies, tools, and frameworks for both backend and frontend development.
• Champion the use of AI and machine learning tools for performance optimization, automated testing, and enhanced developer productivity.

Skills & Qualifications:

Must-Have Skills:

• Proven experience as an Engineering Manager or similar leadership role.
• Strong technical background in backend technologies (e.g., Java, Spring Framework).
• Deep understanding of RESTful API design, microservices architecture.
• Hands-on experience with containerization and orchestration tools like Docker.
• Solid knowledge of Agile methodologies, TDD, and CI/CD pipelines.
• Excellent leadership, communication, and problem-solving skills.
• Expertise in integrating Large Language Models (LLMs) and AI-powered tools into development workflows.

Nice-to-Have Skills:

• Experience with cloud platforms like AWS, GCP, or Azure.
• Knowledge of automated testing frameworks for both backend (e.g., JUnit, Postman) and frontend (e.g., Playwright).
• Understanding of DevOps practices and infrastructure-as-code tools like Terraform.
• Exposure to AI/ML frameworks and libraries for enhancing application features and team efficiency.