Senior Backend Developer

Founding Engineer (Bangalore)

The problem:

Business enterprises overpay vendors - on every batch of invoices, on every month because the data that would catch lives in different systems. We are building an AI agent that processes invoices end-to-end, reasons across all the relevant sources, flags genuine discrepancies, and acts - without a human having to investigate each one.

What you will own

Everything engineering. Schema design to deployment to the 2am fix when something breaks in production. There is no tech lead above you. There is no platform team. There is the architecture, you, and the founders. Concretely, this means building:

• A multi-stage agentic pipeline that takes a vendor invoice and produces a structured decision - fully autonomous for clear cases, escalating to human review for genuinely ambiguous ones. We use LangGraph, but if you've built equivalent systems with Temporal, Prefect, or custom state machines with LLM orchestration, that works
• An LLM-powered extraction layer that handles real invoices - scanned PDFs, stamped documents, inconsistent layouts - and returns structured output
• A graph data model that connects invoices to various sources and can traverse those relationships to detect discrepancies
• ERP connectors, GST validation logic, and a write-back layer that closes the loop

What we need

• Strong Python. Async FastAPI, clean service boundaries, tests that actually catch bugs. You have shipped Python backends that handled real production load
• Solid Postgres. Complex queries, schema design, migrations without downtime, row-level security for multi-tenant data. pgvector is a plus - if not, you pick it up fast
• LLM API experience in production. You have called an LLM API for something that real users depended on. You know about structured output, retry logic, cost management, prompt versioning. A side project counts if it was genuinely deployed
• Comfort with graph data models. You understand when a graph is the right structure and when it is not. You do not need deep Neo4j production experience - you need to understand graph relationships conceptually and be willing to learn Cypher. It is a 2-day ramp for the right person
• Working knowledge of deployment. Deployed and operated production workloads on GCP. Cloud Run, Cloud SQL, Cloud Storage, Redis — you're comfortable across the stack. If you've done it on AWS, the translation isn't hard, but GCP is where we are
• You own things. Not "I contributed to" - you designed it, shipped it, and fixed it when it broke. That pattern needs to be visible in your history

Good to have, not mandatory

• Built an agentic pipeline with multiple stages
• Any fintech, P2P domain experience - even tangential
• Worked at a startup with under 20 people
• Has a GitHub, blog, or writeup that shows how you think about a hard technical problem

What you get

• The hardest engineering problem you would have worked on. This is not CRUD with an LLM bolted on
• Real ownership. First engineering hire. Your architectural decisions will be in this product five years from now
• Equity that matters. ESOP - Open to discussion. We are pre-seed - this is a bet, not a guarantee. We will not pretend otherwise
• No meetings tax. You work directly with the founders. The product is specified clearly. You know what you are building and why

Honest about stage: We do not have a production ready infra yet. We have a complete architecture specification and a working prototype. If you need the stability of an established engineering org, this is not the right moment. If you want to build something real from zero and own a meaningful piece of it, it is.

The founders

One of us has spent 20 years building revenue and operational engines at companies where there was no playbook - part of the pilot team that established the world's largest search company's direct sales operations in India, managed global operations for a global mobile advertising platform, scaled a B2C platform to become one of India’s leading edtech platforms and most recently worked on building an enterprise Agentic Voice AI platform. The other has spent 15 years taking AI from demo to production in domains where failure is expensive - voice, lending, and conversational systems across a Series D conversational AI company, a major telco, a Big 4, and a leading NBFC.

Two IIT/IIM alumni who have both watched AI work in enterprise, and know exactly what it takes to get it there. We are not building this product because it sounds interesting. We are building it because we have both sat across the table from CFOs who know they are losing margin and have no tool capable of doing anything about it.

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 Responsibilities :

• Must have knowledge of at least two PHP frameworks out of Laravel, Cakephp, CodeIgniter and YII.
• Must have basic knowledge of HTML, CSS, JavaScript and jQuery.
• Knowledge of CMS architectures like Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal etc. will be an added advantage.
• Knowledge of eCommerce frameworks like WooCommerce, Magento, OpenCart etc will be an added advantage.
• Good knowledge of Object-Oriented Concepts & a strong passion for Software Development.
• Strong Interaction and Design Sense
• Familiarity with LAMP stack (Apache, MySQL and phpMyAdmin)
• Comfortable with SQL and/or Script Programming.
• Experience in Designing & Developing Database in MySQL is a MUST.

Required Skills:

• Knowledge and/or willingness to learn, highly motivated.
• Fully comfortable working in English, both in written and spoken language.

We are looking for Django Developers who will  work on a wide range of industries namely automobile, banking, education, fashion, etc.

Skills Required: 

• Professional and precise communication skills.
• Creating self-contained, reusable, testable modules and components..
• Extensive knowledge of CSS and JS methods for providing performance visual effects and keeping the frame rate above 30fps at all times.
• Thorough understanding of the responsibilities of the platform,  database, API, caching layer, proxies, and other web services used in the system.
• Validating user actions on the client side and providing responsive  feedback.
• Writing non-blocking code, and resorting to advanced techniques such as multithreading, when needed.
• Experience with all levels of operation available to the front-end, such as from creating XHRs in vanilla JS to using a custom wrapper around resources.
• Experience with building the infrastructure for serving the front-end app and assets.

Qualifications and Experience Requirements:

• 3+ years of experience in Backend Development
• Preferred skills - Python, MySql, PostgreSQL
• Proficiency with Python, Django framework, JavaScript, CSS and HTML5.
• Knowledge of AWS Cloud Services ( EC2, AWS Lambda,Elastic Beanstalk, API Gateway, S3 etc )
• Familiar with XAMPP, LAMP etc.

• Support existing code of PHP webserver
• Proficient in PHP, JavaScript, jQuery, HTML, and MySQL
• Hands-on any PHP-based framework/CMS like Laravel, CakePHP, Zend, CodeIgnitor, Yii.
• Must write efficient code with documentation.
• Any Database: MySQL, MongoDB, NoSQL DBs, postgresql.
• Has experience debugging code.
• Analysis of current DB structure and change table structures as and when required
• Implementation of visual representation of DB data in the form of charts and graphs
• The eventual implementation of a new UI theme with customizations such as drop-down menu data, as well as linking the UI theme front-end with the back-end MySQL
• Implementation of new PHP web services for functions such as analytics, and new modules to existing services
• Ensure cross-platform compatibility of information retrieved from web services on
• Android and iOS platforms, in terms of Push Notifications, platform-specific issues, etc.
• Implementation of SSL security to all web services, logins, and API calls
• Familiar with XMPP would be a plus point.

Roles and responsibilities

• Develop well-designed performant and scalable applications and microservices
• Writing reusable, testable, and efficient code aligning to software development best practices
• Integrate data storage solutions including databases, key-value stores, blob stores, etc.
• Build integrations with 3rd party applications through apis’ to ingest and process data
• Develop state-of-the-art analytics tools to support diverse tasks ranging from ad hoc analysis to production-grade pipelines and workflows for customer applications
• Ensure security and data protection aspects within the applications
• Partner with Data Scientists and Analytics Engineers to improve the performance and reliability of advanced algorithms
• Ensure high performance and availability of distributed systems and applications
• Interact directly with client project team members and operational staff to support live customer deployments and production issues

• 4+ years of experience in developing applications using python and related technologies.
• Familiarity in data ingestion and processing libraries in python.
• Thorough understanding of REST and GRPC technologies.
• Experience in using ORM (Object Relational Mapper) libraries for data access.
• Experiencing in developing and hosting APIs and integration with external applications.
• Experience in building data models and repositories using relational and NoSql databases.
• Knowledge of JIRA, Bitbucket and agile methodologies.
• Good to have knowledge of AWS services like Lambda, dynamodb, kinesis and others.
• Understanding of fundamental design principles behind a scalable application
• Familiarity with event-driven programming
• Strong unit test and debugging skills
• Affinity for learning and applying new technologies and solving new problems
• Effective organizational skills with strong attention to detail
• Experience in working with docker is a plus
• Comfortable in working with Unix/Linux environment
• Strong communication skills — both written and verbal