Lead Backend Engineer

🚀 Job Title : Backend Engineer (Go / Python / Java)

Experience : 3+ Years

Location : Bangalore (Client Location – Work From Office)

Notice Period : Immediate to 15 Days

Open Positions : 4

Working Days : 6 Days a Week

🧠 Job Summary :

We are looking for a highly skilled Backend Engineer to build scalable, reliable, and high-performance systems in a fast-paced product environment.

You will own large features end-to-end — from design and development to deployment and monitoring — while collaborating closely with product, frontend, and infrastructure teams.

This role requires strong backend fundamentals, distributed systems exposure, and a mindset of operational ownership.

⭐ Mandatory Skills :

Strong backend development experience in Go / Python (FastAPI) / Java (Spring Boot) with hands-on expertise in Microservices, REST APIs, PostgreSQL, Redis, Kafka/SQS, AWS/GCP, Docker, Kubernetes, CI/CD, and strong DSA & System Design fundamentals.

🔧 Key Responsibilities :

• Design, develop, test, and deploy backend services end-to-end.
• Build scalable, modular, and production-grade microservices.
• Develop and maintain RESTful APIs.
• Architect reliable distributed systems with performance and fault tolerance in mind.
• Debug complex cross-system production issues.
• Implement secure development practices (authentication, authorization, data integrity).
• Work with monitoring dashboards, alerts, and performance metrics.
• Participate in code reviews and enforce engineering best practices.
• Contribute to CI/CD pipelines and release processes.
• Collaborate with product, frontend, and DevOps teams.

✅ Required Skills :

• Strong proficiency in Go OR Python (FastAPI) OR Java (Spring Boot).
• Hands-on experience building Microservices-based architectures.
• Strong understanding of REST APIs & distributed systems.
• Experience with PostgreSQL and Redis.
• Exposure to Kafka / SQS or other messaging systems.
• Hands-on experience with AWS or GCP.
• Experience with Docker and Kubernetes.
• Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines.
• Strong knowledge of Data Structures & System Design.
• Ability to independently own features and solve ambiguous engineering problems.

⭐ Preferred Background :

• Experience in product-based companies.
• Exposure to high-throughput or event-driven systems.
• Strong focus on code quality, observability, and reliability.
• Comfortable working in high-growth, fast-paced environments.

🧑‍💻 Interview Process :

• 1 Internal Screening Round
• HR Discussion (Project & Communication Evaluation)
• 3 Technical Rounds with Client

This is a fresh requirement, and interviews will be scheduled immediately.

Role & Responsibilities

As a Senior GenAI Engineer you will own the AI layer of our product — building the features that make Zenskar intelligent. This is not a research role and not a prompt-engineering role. You will build production AI systems that enterprise clients depend on, which means reliability, observability, and rigorous evals matter as much as the AI capability itself. You own the full vertical — the model, the pipeline, and the UI.

• Build and own CS Copilot — a real-time assistant for customer success teams, spanning STT pipelines, live transcription, and LLM-powered suggestions
• Build LLM-powered document understanding features — extracting structured, reliable data from unstructured enterprise documents
• Own AI feature UIs end-to-end — you build the interface, not just the model integration layer
• Design and maintain an eval framework — define what 'working' means for each AI feature and catch regressions before users do
• Drive model selection and integration decisions — choosing the right provider and approach for each use case, managing latency and cost
• Own AI platform reliability — observability, fallback behaviour, and graceful degradation when models fail
• Work closely with product, customer success, and the full-stack engineer — AI features only matter if they are usable and trusted by real users

THE IMPACT YOU'LL MAKE-

• You will define what AI means at Zenskar — the features you ship will be the most visible and differentiated parts of the product
• CS Copilot, if done well, changes how enterprise customer success teams operate every single day — this is a high-stakes, high-visibility surface
• You will establish the engineering culture around AI reliability at Zenskar — evals, observability, and disciplined iteration
• Your work will directly accelerate enterprise deals — AI features are increasingly a buying criterion for our clients
• You will be the person who brings engineering rigour to a domain where most companies ship demos and call it a feature

Ideal Candidate

• Strong Senior GenAI / AI Backend Engineer Profiles
• Mandatory (Experience 1) – Must have 4+ years of total software development experience, with at least 2+ years working on AI/LLM-based features in production
• Mandatory (Experience 2) – Must have strong backend engineering experience using Python (FastAPI / Django preferred) and building production-grade systems
• Mandatory (Experience 3) – Must have hands-on experience building LLM-based applications, including OpenAI / Gemini / similar models in real projects
• Mandatory (Experience 4) – Must have experience with RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) including chunking, embeddings, and retrieval pipelines
• Mandatory (Experience 5) – Must have experience designing end-to-end AI pipelines, including chaining, tool usage, structured outputs, and handling failure cases
• Mandatory (Experience 6) – Must have experience building agentic AI systems (multi-step workflows, tool orchestration like LangGraph / CrewAI or custom agents)
• Mandatory (Experience 7) – Must have strong coding and system design skills, not just prompt engineering or experimentation
• Mandatory (Experience 8) – Must have experience shipping AI features in production, not just POCs or research projects
• Mandatory (Experience 9) – Must have experience working with APIs, backend services, and integrations
• Mandatory (Experience 10) – Must have understanding of AI system reliability, including latency, cost optimization, fallback handling, and basic eval thinking
• Mandatory (Company) – Product companies / startups, preferably Series A to Series D
• Mandatory (Note) - Candidate's overall experience should not be more than 7 Yrs
• Mandatory (Tech Stack) – Strong in Python + AI/LLM ecosystem, experience with modern AI tooling and frameworks
• Mandatory (Exclusion) – Reject profiles that are only Prompt Engineers, Data Scientists, or Frontend Engineers without strong backend + system building experience
• Preferred (Skill) – Experience with fine-tuning (LoRA / QLoRA) or open-source model deployment (vLLM / Ollama)
• Preferred (Frontend) – Basic ability to build or contribute to frontend (React or similar)
• Highly Preferred (Education) – Candidates from Tier-1 institutes (IITs, BITS, NITs, IIITs, top global universities)

Strong Software Engineering Profile

Mandatory (Experience 1): Must have 7+ years of experience using Python to design software solutions.

Mandatory (Skills 1): Strong working experience with Python (with Django framework experience) and Microservices architecture is a must.

Mandatory (Skills 2): Must have experience with event-driven architectures using Kafka

Mandatory (Skills 3): Must have Experience in DevOps practices and container orchestration using Kubernetes, along with cloud platforms like AWS, GCP, or Azure

Mandatory (Company): Product companies, Experience working in fintech, banking, or product companies is a plus.

Mandatory (Education): From IIT (Candidate should have done bachelor degree Btech or Dual degree Btech+Mtech or Intergrated Msc), From other premium institutes NIT, MNNIT, VITS, BITS (Candidates should have done B.E/B.Tech)

Preferred

Preferred (Skills 1): Experience in Task Queues like Celery and RabbitMQ is preferred.

Preferred (Skills 2): Experience with RDBMS/SQL is also preferrable.

Preferred (Education): Computer science

• 5+ years of experience
• FlaskAPI, RestAPI development experience
• Proficiency in Python programming.
• Basic knowledge of front-end development.
• Basic knowledge of Data manipulation and analysis libraries
• Code versioning and collaboration. (Git)
• Knowledge for Libraries for extracting data from websites.
• Knowledge of SQL and NoSQL databases
• Familiarity with RESTful APIs
• Familiarity with Cloud (Azure /AWS) technologies

Requirements:

• Proficient in fundamental Software Design Principles, Data Structures, Algorithms, Problem Solving and Complexity Analysis.
• Proficient in programming languages like Python/Java/Javascript/Golang or similar.
• Strong understanding of professional software engineering practices & best practices for the full software development life cycle, including coding standards, code reviews, source control management, build processes, testing, and operations.
• Hands-on Experience with SQL/NoSQL databases such as Postgres, Mysql, MongoDB.
• Hands-on experience with GIT, CI/CD, REST APIs and Cloud ( AWS/ GCP/ Azure) will be preferred.
• Understanding of Microservice Architecture and System Design Principles is a plus.
• Self-driven, detail-oriented and Strong sense of ownership, urgency, and ability to deliver great work.
• Demonstrated expertise in developing, releasing and maintaining large scale software applications.