SDE I: Backend Engineer (Symfony / Laravel)

🚨 We’re Building a “Top 1% Engineering Org”

We’re building a high-talent-density, AI-first R&D organization from scratch — inside a publicly listed company undergoing a full-scale transformation.

Think:

→ Rewriting legacy systems into AI-native architectures

→ Embedding LLMs + Agentic AI into core workflows

→ Reimagining platforms, infra, and data systems for the next decade

This is the kind of shift you’d expect from Google, Microsoft, or Meta —

Except you get to build it from day 0 → scale it globally.

About the Role / Team

We are building a next-generation AI-first R&D organization in Bengaluru, focused on solving complex problems across LLMs, Agentic AI systems, distributed computing, and enterprise-scale architectures.

This initiative is part of a publicly listed global company investing heavily in AI-driven transformation, re-architecting its platforms into intelligent, autonomous systems powered by large language models, workflows, and decision engines.

You will be working on:

• Agentic AI systems & LLM-powered workflows
• Distributed, scalable backend systems
• Enterprise-grade AI platforms
• Automation-first engineering environments

🚀 The Mandate

Own and evolve the technical backbone of an AI-first enterprise platform.

You will define architecture across LLM-powered systems, distributed services, and data platforms — and lead critical transformations from legacy → AI-native systems.

🧩 What You’ll Do

• Architect large-scale distributed systems powering AI-driven workflows
• Lead 0→1 and 1→N platform builds (LLM integrations, agentic systems, orchestration layers)
• Redesign legacy systems into scalable, modular, AI-native architectures
• Drive system design excellence across teams (APIs, infra, observability, reliability)
• Make high-stakes decisions on trade-offs (latency, cost, scalability, model performance)
• Mentor senior engineers and influence engineering culture/org standards
• Partner with product, data, and leadership on long-term technical strategy

🧠 What We’re Looking For

• Proven track record building high-scale backend or platform systems
• Deep expertise in distributed systems, microservices, cloud (AWS/GCP/Azure)
• Strong exposure to data systems/infra / Data / real-time architectures
• Experience or strong interest in LLMs, GenAI, or AI system design
• Exceptional system design, abstraction, and problem-solving ability
• High ownership mindset — you think in terms of systems, not tickets
• Strong coding skills in Python / Java / Go / Node.js
• Solid understanding of data structures, system design basics, and backend architecture
• Experience building scalable APIs and services
• Familiarity or curiosity around AI/LLMs, async systems, or event-driven design
• Strong debugging, problem-solving, and ownership mindset
• Solve hard system problems (latency, scale, reliability)
• Drive cross-team technical decisions and standards
• Mentor senior engineers and influence org-wide architecture 
• Design large-scale distributed systems and backend platforms
• Mentorship & Technical Leadership 
• Expertise in system design, scalability, and performance optimization

Nice to Have

• Experience integrating LLMs, vector databases, or AI pipelines
• Contributions to architecture at scale
• Experience with Agentic AI / LLM orchestration frameworks
• Background in product engineering or platform companies
• Exposure to global-scale systems (millions of users / high throughput)

🔥 What Sets You Apart

• Built platforms used by millions of users / high-throughput systems
• Experience with event-driven systems, stream processing, or infra platforms
• Prior work on AI/ML platforms, model serving, or intelligent systems

About the Role

We’re looking for an Elixir Developer who is passionate about building scalable, high performance backend systems. You’ll work closely with our engineering team to design, develop, and maintain reliable applications that power mission-critical systems.

Key Responsibilities

• Develop and maintain backend services using Elixir and Phoenix framework.

• Build scalable, fault-tolerant, and distributed systems.

• Integrate APIs, databases, and message queues for real-time applications.

• Optimize system performance and ensure low latency and high throughput.

• Collaborate with frontend, DevOps, and product teams to deliver seamless solutions.

• Write clean, maintainable, and testable code with proper documentation.

• Participate in code reviews, architectural discussions, and deployment automation.

Required Skills & Experience

• 2–4 years of hands-on experience in Elixir (or strong functional programming background).

• Experience with Phoenix, Ecto, and RESTful API development.

• Solid understanding of OTP (Open Telecom Platform) concepts like GenServer, Supervisors, etc.

• Proficiency in PostgreSQL, Redis, or similar databases.

• Familiarity with Docker, Kubernetes, or cloud platforms (AWS/GCP/Azure).

• Understanding of CI/CD pipelines, version control (Git), and agile development.

Good to Have

• Experience with microservices architecture or real-time data systems.

• Knowledge of GraphQL, LiveView, or PubSub.

• Exposure to performance profiling, observability, or monitoring tools.

Why Join Us?

• Work with a team that expects and delivers excellence.

• A culture where risk-taking is rewarded, and complacency is not.

• Limitless opportunities for growth—if you can handle the pace.

• A place where learning is currency, and outperformance is the only metric that matters.

• The opportunity to build systems that move markets, execute trades in microseconds, and redefine

fintech.

Our Mission

To make video as accessible to machines as text and voice are today.

At lookup, we believe the world's most valuable asset is trapped. Video is everywhere, but it's unsearchable—a black box of insight that no one can open or atleast open affordably. We’re changing that. We're building the search engine for the visual world, so anyone can find or do anything with video just by asking.

Text is queryable. Voice is transcribed. Video, the largest and richest data source of all, is still a black box. A computer can't understand it, and so its value remains trapped.

Our mission at lookup is to fix this.

About the Role

We are looking for founding Backend Engineers to build a highly performant, reliable, and scalable API platform that makes enterprise video knowledge readily available for video search, summarization, and natural‑language Q&A. You will partner closely with our ML team working on vision‑language models to productionize research and deliver fast, trustworthy APIs for customers.

Examples of technical challenges you will work on include: distributed video storage, a unified application framework and data model for indexing large video libraries, low‑latency clip retrieval, vector search at scale, and end‑to‑end build, test, deploy, and observability in cloud environments.

What You’ll Do:

• Design and build robust backend services and APIs (REST, gRPC) for vector search, video summarization, and video Q&A.
• Own API performance and reliability, including low‑latency retrieval, pagination, rate limiting, and backwards‑compatible versioning.
• Design schemas and tune queries in Postgres, and integrate with unstructured storage.
• Implement observability across metrics, logs, and traces. Set error budgets and SLOs.
• Write clear design docs and ship high‑quality, well‑tested code.
• Collaborate with ML engineers to integrate and productionize VLMs and retrieval pipelines.
• Take ownership of architecture from inception to production launch.

Who You Are:

• 3+ years of professional experience in backend development.
• Proven experience building and scaling polished WebSocket, gRPC, and REST APIs.
• Exposure to distributed systems and container orchestration (Docker and Kubernetes).
• Hands‑on experience with AWS.
• Strong knowledge of SQL (Postgres) and NoSQL (e.g., Cassandra), including schema design, query optimization, and scaling.
• Familiarity with our stack is a plus, but not mandatory: Python (FastAPI), Celery, Kafka, Postgres, Redis, Weaviate, React.
• Ability to diagnose complex issues, identify root causes, and implement effective fixes.
• Comfortable working in a fast‑paced startup environment.

Nice to have:

• Hands-on work with LLM agents, vector embeddings, or RAG applications.
• Building video streaming pipelines and storage systems at scale (FFmpeg, RTSP, WebRTC).
• Proficiency with modern frontend frameworks (React, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS) and responsive UI design.

Location & Culture

• Full-time, in-office role in Bangalore (we’re building fast and hands-on).
• Must be comfortable with a high-paced environment and collaboration across PST time zones for our US customers and investors.
• Expect startup speed — daily founder syncs, rapid design-to-prototype cycles, and a culture of deep ownership.

Why You’ll Love This Role

• Work on the frontier of video understanding and real-world AI — products that can redefine trust and automation.
• Build core APIs that make video queryable and power real customer use.
• Own systems end to end: performance, reliability, and developer experience.
• Work closely with founders and collaborate in person in Bangalore.
• Competitive salary with meaningful early equity.

A B.Tech/M.Tech in Computer Sc, a SDE should have 1-3 years of experience in SW solution development. We are specifically looking for a SDE who:

• is highly proficient in Java Coreand Spring boot applications including making high quality, highly performing code under JVM environment. 
• has good working knowledge in design of n-Tier databases (Postgres, NoSQL DBs e.g. Cassandra/MongoDB)
• has worked in agile development environment under open source gitlab including testing, change management
• is highly proficient in OOD, extensibility, usability, understand data pre-processing
• has exposure to full life cycle of product implementation and deployment of enterprise products driving a subsystem including development under gitlab or github.
• [Desirable] Ability to optimize an ML solution for accuracy and scale
• [Desirable] has experience in working with Advanced Java

Company link: https://www.catalystmi.com/" target="_blank">https://www.catalystmi.com/

Job Location: Mumbai (Hybrid)

• Managing the interchange of data between the server and the users.
• Development of all server-side logic, ensuring high performance and responsiveness to requests from the front-end Integrating the front-end elements built by your co-workers into the application; therefore, a basic understanding of front-end technologies is necessary as well.
• Writing reusable, testable, and efficient code.
• Design and implementation of low-latency, high-availability, and performant applications.
• Integration of user-facing elements developed by front-end developers with server-side logic
• Implementation of security and data protection.

• Should have worked on the Django REST framework.
• Familiarity with some Pandas, Numpy, text parsing/mining and ORM (Object Relational Mapper) libraries
• Able to integrate multiple data sources and databases into one system
• Understanding of the threading limitations of Python, and multi-process architecture
• Good understanding of server-side templating languages
• Worked on Amazon cloud solutions
• Understanding of accessibility and security compliance
• Knowledge of user authentication and authorization between multiple systems, servers, and environments
• Understanding of fundamental design principles behind a scalable application
• Familiarity with event-driven programming in Python
• Able to create database schemas that represent and support business processes
• Strong unit test and debugging skills
• Proficient understanding of code versioning tool
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
• Should know about HDL and LLD.
• Should know about making python packages
• Should have worked on microservice-based Architecture

We are looking for a Full Stack Laravel Developer who is dedicated to the craft, writes code that they are proud of and can hit the ground running.

You will be a part of a full-stack creative team that is responsible for all aspects of the ongoing software development from the initial specification, through to developing, testing and launching.

Responsibilities

• Write “clean”, well-designed code
• Produce detailed specifications
• Troubleshoot, test and maintain the core product software and databases to ensure strong optimization and functionality
• Contribute in all phases of the development lifecycle
• Follow industry best practices
• Develop and deploy new features to facilitate related procedures and tools if necessary

Requirements

• Proven software development experience in Laravel Framework
• Demonstrable knowledge of web technologies including HTML, CSS, Javascript, AJAX etc
• Good knowledge of relational databases, version control tools and of developing web services
• Passion for best design and coding practices and a desire to develop new bold ideas
• BS/MS degree in Computer Science, Engineering or a related subject

• As a Senior Software Engineer you will work closely with the Tech Lead, and the rest of the engineering team to build and scale a data-driven platform. This role will act as a great springboard to accelerate career growth & transition into a Tech Lead level role.
• Your primary focus will be the development of server-side logic, building new services and APIs, developing core business logic, supporting the maintenance of current APIs, reviewing work, and improving the performance and reliability of our systems as we rapidly scale our product and organization.
• An effective Senior Software Engineer will be a self-motivated learner; a highly creative engineer having obsessive attention towards detail and thoroughness.

Must Haves

• You’ve been building web applications professionally for 5+ years
• You’re proficient in PHP 7, Laravel, and PostgreSQL
• You possess strong OOP and design pattern knowledge
• Familiar with modern engineering practices: Code Reviews, Continuous Deployment, Automated Testing, etc
• You write understandable, testable code with an eye towards maintainability and experienced with TDD (Test Driven Development)
• You’ve the ability to build RESTful APIs
• Explaining complex technical concepts to designers, support team, and fellow engineers is not a problem for you
• Well versed with the fundamentals of computer science and distributed systems

Nice-to-haves

• FrontEnd experience; have built applications in either: React, Vue, Angular, or Svelte
• Startup experience, preferably a tech startup
• Open Source contributor
• You have experience with other programming languages -- e.g. NodeJS, Python, Ruby, Go, C, etc.
• Passionate about/experienced with open source and developer tools
• You have a bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering or related field, or equivalent training, fellowship, or work experience

Bonus

• Experience deploying applications; AWS, DigitalOcean, etc.
• Experience with leading a team of 3+ developers

Apply if

• You want to be a team member rather than an employee - cultural fit is the most important thing. Start-up life is a roller coaster and we want to make sure no matter how the day has gone we can still go out (virtually) for a pint at the end of it
• You take ownership
• You’ve an eye for detail
• You’re a problem solver, and a perpetual learner
• You possess a positive and solution-oriented mindset