Senior Backend Developer

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.

Job Description:

• Experience in Core Java, Spring Boot.

• Experience in microservices.

• Extensive experience in developing enterprise-scale systems for global organization. Should possess good architectural knowledge and be aware of enterprise application design patterns.

• Should be able to analyze, design, develop and test complex, low-latency client-facing applications.

• Good development experience with RDBMS in SQL Server, Postgres, Oracle or DB2

• Good knowledge of multi-threading

• Basic working knowledge of Unix/Linux

• Excellent problem solving and coding skills in Java

• Strong interpersonal, communication and analytical skills.

• Should be able to express their design ideas and thoughts. 

• Backend development along with team management
• Hands on experience in product development 
• Preferred candidates from Fintech and Banking sectors
• Exp in Python / Java slong with databases like MySQL, NoSQL, etc
• Knowledge of Agile methodology

The ideal candidate should be a self-motivated, multi-tasker, and demonstrated team player. You will be responsible for the production support of software products and coordinating with various teams for support. You should have outstanding communication and Team-Player skills.

Educational Qualification: BCA, MCA or BE/B.Tech (CS)

Must-know technologies: Java,
Good to know technologies: DMN tools
Experience: 02 Years - 05 Years
Skill Level: Good

Responsibilities:

• Contribute to Java development work as well as the latest Decision model and notation tools

   

• Comply with coding standards and directions given by his direct manager Collaborate with an international and diverse team of Data Architects, Business Analysts, and Project Managers

• Tasks will be assigned and after completion, code need to be committed and task assigned for review by Senior Java developer

• Work with technology stakeholders to devise solutions that will fulfill business requirements and meet organizational strategic goals

• Develop application functionality which meets business requirements with high quality within given deadlines - develop maintainable, well-documented application functionality with an eye toward standardization, common components, simplicity, performance, robustness and other attributes of enterprise-strength solutions

• Thoroughly test all functionality - utilize detailed and thorough practices including negative testing, testing of boundary conditions, , and work collaboratively with business areas.

• Support interfaces between the deployment of developed applications and the decommissioning of legacy applications

• Support with the Development and Infrastructure Teams

• Design, and develop scalable, high-performance, highly reliable and secure applications using waterfall and agile methodologies

• Create reusable code

JD:

As a Software Development Engineer at Amazon, you have industry-leading technical abilities and demonstrate breadth and depth of knowledge. You build software to deliver business impact, making smart technology choices. You work in a team and drive things forward.

Responsibilities:

• You solve problems at their root, stepping back to understand the broader context.
• You develop pragmatic solutions and build flexible systems that balance engineering complexity and timely delivery, creating business impact.
• You understand a broad range of data structures and algorithms and apply them to deliver high-performing applications.
• You recognise and use design patterns to solve business problems.
• You understand how operating systems work, perform and scale.

Requirements:

• You write high quality, maintainable, and robust code.
• You recognise and adopt best practices in software engineering: design, testing, version control, documentation, build, deployment, and operations.
• You have experience building scalable software systems that are high-performance, highly-available, highly transactional, low latency and massively distributed.
• Bachelors or Masters in Computer Science or relevant technical field.
• Experience in software development and full product life-cycle.
• Excellent programming skills in any object oriented programming languages - preferably Java, C/C++/C#, Perl, Python, or Ruby.
• Strong knowledge of data structures, algorithms, and designing for performance, scalability, and availability.
• Proficiency in SQL and data modeling.

About SteelEye

SteelEye is a fast growing FinTech company based in London and has offices in Bangalore and Paris, that offers a data platform to help financial institutions such as Investment Banks, Hedge Funds, Brokerage Firms, Asset Management Firms to comply with financial regulations in the European Union. Our clients can aggregate, search, surveillance and report on trade, communications and market data. SteelEye also enables customers to gain powerful insights from their data, helping them to trade with greater efficiency and profitability. The company has a highly experienced management team and a strong board, who have decades of technology and management experience and worked in senior positions at many leading international financial businesses. We are looking to hire a seasoned SRE to join us as we start on our next phase of growth. We have a culture of openness, collaboration, and the passion to get things done whilst appreciating the importance of a good work life balance.

Being part of a start-up can be equally exciting as it is challenging. You will be part of the SteelEye team not just because of your talent but also because of your entrepreneurial flare which we thrive on at SteelEye. This means we want you to be curious, contribute, ask questions and share ideas. We encourage you to get involved in helping shape our business.

What you’ll do

• Deliver plugins for our Python-based ETL pipelines.
• Deliver Python microservices for provisioning and managing cloud infrastructure.
• Implement algorithms to analyse large data sets.
• Draft design documents that translate requirements into code.
• Deal with challenges associated with handling large volumes of data.
• Assume responsibilities from technical design through technical client support.
• Manage expectations with internal stakeholders and context-switch in a fast paced environment.
• Thrive in an environment that uses AWS and Elasticsearch extensively.
• Keep abreast of technology and contribute to the engineering strategy.
• Champion best development practices and provide mentorship.

What we’re looking for

• Experience in o Python 3.
• o Python libraries used for data (such as pandas, numpy).
• o AWS.
• o Elasticsearch.
• o Performance tuning.
• o Object Oriented Design and Modelling.
• o Delivering complex software, ideally in a FinTech setting.
• o CI/CD tools.
• Knowledge of design patterns.
• Sharp analytical and problem-solving skills.
• Strong sense of ownership.
• Demonstrable desire to learn and grow.
• Excellent written and oral communication skills.
• Mature collaboration and mentoring abilities.

About SteelEye Culture

• Work from home until you are vaccinated against COVID-19
• Top of the line health insurance • Order discounted meals every day from a dedicated portal
• Fair and simple salary structure
• 30+ holidays in a year
• Fresh fruits every day
• Centrally located. 5 mins to the nearest metro station (MG Road)
• Measured on output and not input