Product Engineer

GradRight is an ed-fin-tech startup focused on global higher education. Using data science, technology and strategic partnerships across the industry, we enable students to find the “Right University” at the “Right Cost”. We are on a mission to aid a million students to find their best-fit universities and financial offerings by 2025.

Our flagship product - FundRight is the world’s first student loan bidding platform. In a short span of 10 months, we have facilitated disbursements of more than $ 50 million in loans this year and we are poised to scale up rapidly.

We are launching our second product - SelectRight as an innovative approach to college selection and student recruitment for students and universities, respectively. The product rests on the three pillars of data science, transparency and ethics and hopes to create value for students and universities. 

Brief:

We are pursuing a complex set of problems that involve building for an international audience and for an industry that has largely been service-centric. As a Principal Engineer at GradRight, you’ll bring an unmatched customer-centricity to your work, with a focus on building for the long term and large scale.

You’ll drive the creation of frameworks that enable flexible/scalable customer journeys and tie them with institutional knowledge to help us build the best experiences for students and our partners. You’ll also manage a team of high performers to achieve the planned outcomes.

You’ll own the technology strategy of the engineering organization and be a key decision maker when it comes to processes and execution.

Responsibilities:

1. Drive design discussions and decisions around building scalable and modular architecture
2. Work with product, engineering and business teams to ideate on technology strategy and line up initiatives around the same
3. Build clean, modular and scalable backend services
4. Build clean, modular and scalable frontends
5. Own quality and velocity of releases across the engineering organization
6. Manage and mentor a team of engineers
7. Participate in sprint ceremonies and actively contribute to scaling the engineering organization from a process perspective
8. Stay on top of the software engineering ecosystem, propose and implement new technologies/methodologies as per the business needs
9. Contribute to engineering hiring by conducting interviews
10. Champion infrastructure-as-code mindset and encourage automation
11. Identify problems around engineering processes, propose solutions and drive implementations for the same

Requirements:

1. At least 8 years of experience, building large scale applications
2. Experience working at startups in growth phase with war stories to share
3. Experience with frontend technologies like vue.js or react.js
4. Strong experience with at least one backend framework, preferably express.js
5. Extensive experience in at least one programming language (preferably Javascript, GoLang) and ability to write maintainable, scalable and unit-testable code
6. Experience in CI/CD and cloud infrastructure management
7. Strong understanding of software design principles and patterns
8. Excellent command over data structures and algorithms
9. Passion for solving complex problems
10. Good understanding of various database technologies with strong opinions around their use cases
11. Experience with performance monitoring and scaling backend services
12. Experience with microservices and distributed systems in general
13. Experience with team management
14. Excellent written and verbal communication skills

Good to have:

1. Worked on products that addressed an international audience
2. Worked on products that scaled to millions of users
3. Exposure to emerging/latest technologies like blockchain, bots, AR/VR
4. Exposure to AI/ML

• SAAS
• Enterprise 
• fintech 
• Payments
• Healthcare

• See less

• Actively work with Product Managers to scope out and plan projects
• Be actively involved in hiring and growing our engineering team
• Plan and organize sprints with a highly ambitious group of engineers
• Actively work with engineers helping them break roadblocks throughout the sprints
• Involved in building and reviewing Project Architecture
• Actively review Code, Product and API Specifications
• Develop engineers on the team and help them advance in their careers
• Care about agility as much you care about scalability and availability
• Build and help us evolve our culture
• Teams at Our Company is expected to be comfortable working across the stack, delivering new features and products from start to finish
• Most products are Ruby on Rails applications with ReactJS frontends. We have PostgreSQL for most of our storage, and everything is hosted on AWS

• Clear and influential in both, writing and person
• Being a role model for the team
• Bringing-in the experience of building and scaling system to 100x
• Programming expert - help team resolve programming related issues as quickly as possible and introduce the team to better ways of building products.

• Opportunity to work with "India’s leading B2B" E-commerce venture. The company grew its revenue by more than 5.5x last year to reach to a 350 Cr annual revenue run rate scale. We invite you to be part of the upcoming growth story of B2B sector through Us.
• Opportunity to work with most dynamic individuals in Asia recognized under Forbes 30 Under 30 and industry stalwarts from across companies like Microsoft, Paypal, Gravitas, Parksons, ITC, Snapdeal, Fedex, Deloitte and HUL
• Our Company is featured in LinkedIn Top Startups 2019: The 25 hottest Indian companies to work for!
• Working here translates into being a part of a dynamic start-up with some of the most enthusiastic, hardworking and intelligent people in a fast paced and electrifying environment
• Our company has been awarded as the most Disruptive Procurement Startup of the year - 2017
• Being a company that is expanding itself every day and working towards exploring newer avenues in the market, every employee grows with the company
• The position provides a chance to build on existing talents, learn new skills and gain valuable experience in the field of Ecommerce

• Key Technical Skills: Deep experience on Performance Engineering with understanding of Java/J2EE technologies.
• Experienced in defining and realizing end-to-end Technical Architecture for large scale real- time enterprise Ability to identify and define non-functional requirements and design systems to meet the same.
• Ability to review existing Architectures and identify Risks, Trade-offs, and share recommendations for addressing the identified
• Demonstrate strong understanding of cloud architecture considerations when scaling and tuning application deployments. Must have hands on experience working on any of the Cloud deployments on AWS or
• Good experience on leveraging APM tools to provide deep dive analysis on performance problems. Deep understanding of the dashboards which can be built for CIO level interactions. Must have relevant experience on APM tools like Dynatrace or AppDynamics.
• Experience in performance optimization of J2EE systems on any of different types of application servers - WebLogic, WebSphere, JBoss etc. Deep expertise in any one of the application servers is a
• Experience in creating and reviewing technical documents like Architecture blueprint, Design specifications, Deployment
• Experience on working on Performance Testing Projects. Fair understanding of Performance Testing tools - Apache JMeter /Gatling/ HP Load Runner for Load testing. Must be in a position to review Performance Testing programs and steer directions towards right Workload Model, appropriate Test and Monitoring Strategy, build performance models and derive at right Capacity Planning.

• Experience in Big Data Analytics like - Apache Kafka, Apache Storm, Apache Hadoop, Apache
• Good skills in RDBMS like: Oracle, MS-SQL, MySQL, Cassandra, and Mongo DB
• Exposure to Agile methodologies & Continuous Integration Tools
• Entrepreneur / Intrapreneur (someone who has built technology teams ground-up, built new solutions from scratch)
• Very sound understanding of technology and have a consultative
• Sound understanding of complex enterprise IT environment and issues faced by CIOs in the digital
• Excellent Pre-sales experience and have played a key role in winning business along with the sales
• Excellent communication, interpersonal, liaison and problem-solving skills with the ability to work in a multi-cultural environment
• Good negotiation skills
• Go getter and results oriented
• High energy level with ability to work well under pressure
• Good relationship building skills. Someone who enjoys CIOs trust and has an ability to develop relationships at all levels (technology teams) of the customer

Role

The role is a unique opportunity to be a part of the founding team of KAFQA. The responsibilities of the role are per the below:

• Product Development: Partner with the founder & product team to create a product roadmap. Play a key role in influencing customer journey, experience & specs (requirements) with UX designer. Develop front end & back end systems and product. 
• Project Management: Ensure product development roadmap timelines are achieved in a timely way with the right quality with progress being reported daily. 
• Technology Excellence: Ensure that products have best in class performance on technology driven aspects (load times, latencies, uptimes, etc.). 
• Hiring & Developing: Hire junior engineers, divide project workloads & mentor them to continuously improve.
• Continuous Improvement: Establish intake mechanism to convert user feedback into actionable upgrades in product design, track feature improvements & their progress and create rapid improvement cycles. 

The role is based in Bangalore, India and reports directly to the Founder, CEO of KAFQA.

Experience, Qualifications & Person Type

The ideal candidate is someone who – 

• Has 4+ years of experience in a digital product company
• Should have managed teams before & can attract talent
• Has experience in front end & back end technologies across web & app development
• Has studied computer science or engineering with at least a B.Tech or B.E degree
• Preferably is skilled in at least one performing art or is a hobbyist
• Is willing to fulfil all responsibilities above & go beyond as needed
• Moves fast to launch & fix issues 
• Is a self-starter, operates with autonomy & can deal with ambiguity while being innovative & frugal

The is a senior role that involves leading the engineering team and get to work amongst the sharpest of minds in the Indian Internet fraternity in Product and Technology. This is a challenging role that expects the incumbent to work with constant agility with various teams and deliver the best products in the space using effective technology platforms. The role is based out of HQ in Gurgaon.

Someone from Fintech/Product based Company would be preffered

Job Purpose: Plan, drive, and review delivery of projects in line with the agreed product pipeline with the objective of improving the technology delivery strength thereby contributing in achieving the organizational top and bottom line. Lead initiatives on transformations and re-engineering of the product platform.

• Contribute as part of the technology team to determine strategic directions
• Forge and install goals and standards for engineering performance
• Measure and ensure engineering, product delivery goals are met with, at an acceptable velocity and without trading off quality and performance
• Constantly motivate, mentor, and guide the engineering team members
• Harness the capabilities of individuals and teams to ensure appropriate opportunities and growth for them Work closely and coherently with the product development team to ensure alignment and achievement of product and engineering goals
• Devise processes and mechanisms to ensure expected uptime of production applications - Augment skills and capability of the engineering team by recruiting and training the members
• Ensure smooth communication channels within the team and with all stakeholders involved in the product development and delivery process

-Contribute to crafting and own the execution of strategic product development plans

• Manage multiple technology delivery teams
• Responsible for coaching, developing, motivating & retaining team members
• Responsible for overall employee engagement of the team

• Engineering graduate with a minimum of 8 Years of relevant experience
• Hands-on experience in Core J2EE or Core Java (collection, multithreading, OOPS concepts
• Experienced in successful implementation/adoption of agile and extreme programming methodologies
• Brilliant at communication, estimation and delivery, change management, and leadership capabilities
• Should have managed a large technology team directly or through the hierarchy
• Hands-on expertise would be an added advantage

Must Have Experience/Attributes -
Multi-year experience in Designing & Coding Applications of a successful Online platform
Experience in Designing Distributed Applications @ Scale
Proficiency with scalability and high availability strategies for Java Services & Microservices on distributed platform
Defining solution based on the set of Non Functional Requirements - security, reliability, performance, maintainability, scalability, and usability
Strong Debugging and Troubleshooting expertise
Strong desire and ability to look for and adopt best practices/community driven open source framework and technologies into design deliverables
Should be obsessed with code quality, performance optimization and tools usage to improve productivity/quality
Excellent communication skills and the ability to interface with senior leadership with confidence and clarity
Experience of driving activities to influence code quality and process rigor
Enthusiastically follow technology trends, software engineering best practice and technologies while enjoying the challenge of solving complex problems
Experience of working on E-commerce platform
Experience in Dockers and container orchestration on Kubernetes
Working Experience in Integration Technologies / Middleware like Kafka, Rabbit MQ , ESB
Knowledge on Cloud Ecosystem - Added Advantage