Low Latency C++ Developer - Core Systems

A BIT ABOUT US

Appknox is one of the top Mobile Application security companies recognized by Gartner and G2. A profitable B2B SaaS startup headquartered in Singapore & working from Bengaluru.

The primary goal of Appknox is to help businesses and mobile developers secure their mobile applications with a focus on delivery speed and high-quality security audits.

Our business includes Fortune 500 companies with Major brands spread across regions like India, South-East Asia, Middle-East, Japan, US, and expanding rapidly. 

The Opportunity:

We are seeking a highly skilled Senior Software Engineer (Backend) to join our dynamic software development team. In this role, you will contribute to key backend projects, collaborate across teams, and play a vital part in delivering robust, scalable, and high-performance software solutions. As a senior engineer, you will work independently, make impactful technical decisions, and help shape the backend architecture while collaborating with a passionate, high-performing team.

You will work hands-on with products primarily built in Python, with opportunities to contribute to Golang. These technologies are at the core of our development stack, and your focus will be on building, scaling, and maintaining distributed services. Distributed systems are integral to our architecture, providing a chance to gain hands-on experience with maintaining and optimizing them in a fast-paced environment.

As a Senior Engineer, you are expected to:

• Write clean, maintainable, and testable code while following best practices.
• Architect solutions, address complex problems, and deliver well-thought-out technical designs.
• Take ownership of assigned modules and features, delivering them with minimal supervision.
• Contribute to code reviews and technical discussions, ensuring high-quality deliverables.

We highly value open source contributions and encourage you to check out our work on GitHub at Appknox GitHub. While no prior experience in security is required, our experienced security professionals are available to support you in understanding the domain.

This role offers a unique opportunity to work on cutting-edge technology, drive impactful solutions, and grow within a collaborative environment that values autonomy, innovation, and technical excellence.

Responsibilities:

• Drive backend development for a disruptive product in the Security domain, focusing on innovation, performance, scalability, and maintainability.
• Take ownership of the software design process, including designing workflows, system architecture, and implementation plans.
• Translate functional and technical requirements into detailed architecture and design, making independent decisions to ensure efficiency and scalability.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams, including frontend and security teams, to deliver cohesive and high-quality solutions.
• Conduct thorough code reviews to ensure adherence to best practices, maintainability, and coding standards.
• Write clean, maintainable, and testable code using Django and Python, adhering to industry best practices.
• Design and implement scalable software components, frameworks, and APIs using Django and Django REST Framework (DRF).
• Troubleshoot, debug, and optimize existing systems to improve functionality and performance.
• Create detailed technical documentation, including flowcharts, layouts, and system requirements, to ensure clarity and alignment.
• Develop and enforce robust software verification plans, quality assurance procedures, and deployment strategies.
• Ensure timely delivery of software updates while addressing user feedback to enhance solutions.
• Provide technical expertise to solve backend challenges and participate in critical decision-making processes.
• Support team growth by sharing knowledge, fostering collaboration, and mentoring junior engineers informally as needed.

Requirements:

• 5–6 years of professional experience in backend development with a strong focus on Django and Python.
• Proficiency in Django REST Framework (DRF), relational databases, SQL, and ORMs (e.g., Django ORM, SQLAlchemy).
• Strong problem-solving skills with the ability to make independent technical decisions regarding system design and implementation.
• Hands-on experience in designing and developing scalable, maintainable, and high-performing backend systems.
• Deep understanding of software engineering practices, including Test-Driven Development (TDD), CI/CD pipelines, and deployment processes.
• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to document and present technical specifications and workflows clearly.
• Familiarity with cloud infrastructure, deployment pipelines, and microservices architectures is a bonus.
• Self-motivated and capable of working independently in a fast-paced environment with minimal supervision.
• Ability to handle ambiguity and adapt to rapidly changing business needs while maintaining focus on delivering quality solutions.

Work Expectations:

Within 1 month-

• Attend KT sessions conducted by the engineering and product teams to gain a deep understanding of the product, its architecture, and workflows.
• Learn about the team's development processes, tools, and key challenges.
• Work closely with the product team to understand product requirements and contribute to the design and development of features.
• Dive deep into the existing backend architecture, including database structures, APIs, and integration points, to fully understand the technical landscape
• Begin addressing minor technical challenges and bugs, while understanding the underlying architecture and tech stack.
• Begin to participate in creating action plans for new features, ensuring that design and implementation are aligned with product goals.

Within 3 months-

• Achieve full autonomy in working on the codebase, demonstrating the ability to independently deliver high-quality features from design to deployment.
• Take complete ownership of critical modules, ensuring they are optimized for performance and maintainability.
• Act as a technical resource for the team, offering support and guidance to peers on complex issues.
• Collaborate with DevOps to optimize deployment pipelines, debug production issues, and improve backend infrastructure.
• Lead discussions for technical solutions and provide recommendations for architectural improvements.
• Contribute to the design of new features by translating functional requirements into detailed technical specifications.
• Prepare regular updates on assigned tasks and communicate effectively with the engineering manager and other stakeholders.

Within 6 months-

• Be fully independent in their development tasks, contributing to key features and solving critical challenges.
• Demonstrate strong problem-solving skills and the ability to take ownership of technical modules.
• Actively participate in code reviews and technical discussions, ensuring high-quality deliverables.
• Collaborate seamlessly with cross-functional teams to align technical solutions with business requirements.
• Establish themselves as a reliable and proactive team member, contributing to the team’s growth and success.

Personality traits we really admire :-

• Great attitude to ask questions, learn and suggest process improvements.
• Has attention to details and helps identify edge cases.
• Highly motivated and coming up with ideas and perspective to help us move towards our goals faster.
• Follows timelines and absolute commitment to deadlines.

Interview Process 

• Round 1 Interview - Profile Evaluation (EM)
• Round 2 Interview - Assignment Evaluation & Technical Problem Solving Discussion (Tech Team)
• Round 3 Interview - System Design (Sr. Architect)
• Round 4 Interview - Engineering Team & Technical Founder (CTO)
• Round 5 Interview - HR

Compensation

• Best in industry

We prefer that every employee also holds equity in the company. In this role, you will be awarded equity after 12 months, based on the impact you have created.

Please be aware that all your customers are Enterprises and Fortune 500 companies.

Why Join Us :-

• Freedom & Responsibility: If you are a person who enjoys challenging work & pushing your boundaries, then this is the right place for you. We appreciate new ideas & ownership as well as flexibility with working hours.
• Great Salary & Equity: We keep up with the market standards & provide pay packages considering updated standards. Also as Appknox continues to grow, you’ll have a great opportunity to earn more & grow with us. Moreover, we also provide equity options for our top performers.
• Holistic Growth: We foster a culture of continuous learning and take a much more holistic approach to training and developing our assets: the employees. We shall also support you all on that journey of yours.
• Transparency: Being a part of a start-up is an amazing experience one of the reasons being the open communication & transparency at multiple levels. Working with Appknox will give you the opportunity to experience it all first hand.
• Health insurance: We offer health insurance coverage upto 5 Lacs for you and your family including parents.

Job Summary: 

We are seeking a highly skilled and experienced Backend Lead to design, develop, and maintain scalable, reliable, and high-performance backend solutions for our multi-tenant SaaS products. The ideal candidate will have a deep understanding of distributed systems, microservices, and cloud-based architectures, with a proven track record in handling production issues at scale. You will collaborate closely with the AI Lead and Frontend Lead to ensure seamless integration of backend services, AI/ML pipelines, and front-end functionalities, thereby

delivering a robust, secure, and feature-rich experience to our customers.

Key Responsibilities:

1. System Architecture & Design

• Define and implement the overall backend architecture for multi-tenant SaaS applications, ensuring scalability, high availability, security, and compliance.
• Design microservices and RESTful/GraphQL APIs and Websockets in alignment with front-end and AI requirements.
• Establish design patterns and best practices for code modularity, performance optimization, and scalability.
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2. Scalability & Performance

• Identify performance bottlenecks and oversee optimization strategies (caching, load balancing, message queues, etc.).
• Implement and maintain monitoring/observability solutions (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, ELK Stack) to ensure real-time system health insights and rapid incident response.
• Establish performance baselines, conduct stress tests, and implement disaster recovery strategies.

3. Production Stability & Issue Resolution

• Proactively monitor production environments, anticipating potential failures and bottlenecks.
• Triage, diagnose, and resolve production incidents with minimal downtime, using robust logging, tracing, and on-call rotation strategies.
• Drive root cause analysis and post-mortems for production incidents, implementing preventative measures.
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4. Collaboration & Cross-Functional Coordination

• Work closely with the AI team to integrate MLOps pipelines, ensuring smooth data flow and secure model deployment.
• Collaborate with the Frontend team to provide well-defined API contracts, enabling efficient UI/UX development.
• Partner with DevOps to define CI/CD pipelines, container orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes), and infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, CloudFormation) practices.

5. Team Leadership & Mentorship

• Lead and mentor a team of backend developers, setting clear goals and providing guidance on best practices.
• Perform code reviews to ensure high code quality, maintainability, and adherence to design standards.
• Foster a culture of continuous learning, encouraging the adoption of new technologies, tools, and methodologies.

6. Security & Compliance

• Implement secure coding practices and follow industry standards (e.g., OWASP Top 10).
• Work with compliance teams to ensure data privacy and regulatory requirements (HIPAA) are met.
• Oversee authentication/authorization frameworks (OAuth, JWT, etc.) and data encryption at rest and in transit(Encryption, SSL/TLS).

7. Documentation

• Maintain comprehensive technical documentation, including architecture diagrams, APIs, database schemas, and operational runbooks.
• Facilitate knowledge sharing sessions and handovers to ensure smooth onboarding of new team members.

Qualifications

Education:

Bachelor’s or master's degree in computer science,engineering, or a related field.

Experience:

• 8+ years of experience in backend or full-stack development, with 3+ years in a technical lead or architect role.
• Demonstrated history of leading and delivering large-scale, distributed systems in production environments.

Technical Expertise:

• Languages & Frameworks: Proficiency in modern backend languages (e.g., Python) and associated frameworks (Django/FastAPI, etc.).
• Database Systems: Strong knowledge of both SQL (MySQL, PostgreSQL) and NoSQL (MongoDB, Cassandra) databases, including data modeling and query optimization.
• Microservices & Architecture: Hands-on experience with microservices,containerization (Docker, Kubernetes), and service mesh architectures.
• Cloud Platforms: Experience with cloud providers like AWS and Azure for deployment, scaling, and monitoring.
• CI/CD & DevOps: Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines, Git workflows,infrastructure-as-code, and automated testing.
• Monitoring & Observability: Proficiency with tools like Prometheus, Grafana, ELK Stack, Loki for real-time monitoring and log analysis.

Soft Skills:

• Leadership: Ability to lead teams, manage conflict, and drive a vision for the backend architecture.
• Communication: Strong written and verbal communication skills to coordinate with cross-functional teams (AI, Frontend, QA, Product).
• Problem-Solving: Analytical mindset for troubleshooting complex issues in high- pressure environments.
• Collaboration: Demonstrated capability to work seamlessly across multiple teams and stakeholders.

• 3+ years of experience with Ruby On Rails.
• Strong Project & Time Management Skills, along with the ability to apply these skills while working independently, or as part of a team.
• Knowledge of blockchain technology, smart contracts and cryptocurrency will be an added advantage
• Experience in fintech domain will be another added advantage
• Bachelor’s degree in computer programming, computer science, or a related field.
• Fluency or understanding of specific languages, such as Java, PHP, or Python, and operating systems may be required.

• 3+ years of work experience as a Python Developer. 
• Sound understanding and knowledge of Python and its ecosystem libraries like pandas and numpy. Also be able to write modular code and understand the python packaging system. 

• Experience on web crawling, scraping (Scrapy,BeautifulSoup, Selenium) and web application development using Django/Flask Framework. 
• Experience on Data-Science; exposure to Theanos, Tensorflow, Pytorch (preferable) 
• Exposure to data mining, Pyspark (preferable)