Senior Backend Engineer

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 an SDE 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 contribute to frameworks that enable flexible/scalable customer journeys and tying them with institutional knowledge to help us build the best experiences for students and our partners.

Responsibilities:

1. Contribute to design discussions and decisions around building scalable and modular architecture
2. Build clean, modular and scalable backend services
3. Participate in sprint ceremonies and actively contribute to scaling the engineering organization from a process perspective
4. Stay on top of the software engineering ecosystem and propose new technologies/methodologies that can be adopted
5. Contribute to engineering hiring by conducting interviews
6. Champion infrastructure as code mindset and encourage automation
7. Manage and mentor a small team of junior engineers

Requirements:

1. At least 4 years experience as an SDE, building large scale services
2. Extensive experience in at least one programming language and ability to write maintainable, scalable and unit-testable code
3. Strong understanding of software design principles and patterns
4. Excellent command over data structures and algorithms
5. Passion for solving complex problems
6. Good understanding of various database technologies with strong opinions around their use cases
7. Experience with performance monitoring and scaling backend services
8. Experience with microservices and distributed systems in general
9. Experience with team management
10. Excellent written and verbal communication skills

Good to have:

1. Experience working with node.js, MongoDB and Google Cloud
2. Experience in CI/CD and cloud infrastructure management
3. Worked on products that addressed an international audience
4. Worked on products that scaled to millions of users

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.

Your Impact

• Build scalable backend services.
• Design, implement, and maintain databases, ensuring data integrity, security, and efficient retrieval.
• Implement the core logic that makes applications work, handling data processing, user requests, and system operations
• Contribute to the architecture and design of new product features
• Optimize systems for performance, scalability, and security
• Stay up-to-date with new technologies and frameworks, contributing to the advancement of software development practices
• Working closely with product managers and designers to turn ideas into reality and shape the product roadmap.

What skills do you need?

• 4+ years of experience in backend development, especially building robust APIS using Node.js, Express.js, MYSQL
• Strong command of JavaScript and understanding of its quirks and best practices
• Ability to think strategically when designing systems—not just how to build, but why
• Exposure to system design and interest in building scalable, high-availability systems
• Prior work on B2C applications with a focus on performance and user experience
• Ensure that applications can handle increasing loads and maintain performance, even under heavy traffic
• Work with complex queries for performing sophisticated data manipulation, analysis, and reporting.
• Knowledge of Sequelize, MongoDB and AWS would be an advantage.
• Experience in optimizing backend systems for speed and scalability.

• 5 + years of hands-on experience in .NET, Angular and related Web technologies.

• 2 - 3+ years of experience designing and supporting Azure environments, including IaaS and PaaS

• Past experience in cloud computing and technology systems, as well as experience in designing and transferring applications to the cloud.

• Proven experience in Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) as well as DevOps principles to achieve SDLC goals of Global Banking Technology

• Hands on experience using the Azure/AWS administration portal.

• Knowledge of at least one other cloud hosting solution (e.g., Azure, Google, AWS, Helion Cloud).

• Good hands-on experience in SOA, XML, WSDL, XSD, WSDL XML schema and namespaces (J2EE and .NET), MS .NET Framework, C#, HTML, Javascript, Micro Services/ APIs, Messaging, Threading, IBM DB.

• Have experience on development of container applications.

• Good knowledge of IBM DB. Should be comfortable writing stored procedures and user defined functions.

• Strong business knowledge of wealth management industry.

• Component / business object modeling, services modeling.

• Experience in building high concurrency, low latency 247 availability applications.

• Strong programming skills with emphasis on writing efficient algorithms to handle large data sets and processing.

• Understanding of HTTP, IIS and how the browser works.

• Ability to coordinate with various teams to deliver projects successfully.

• Knowledge of UML design.

• Knowledge of source control (preferably Git) and continuous Integration tools.

• Have working Knowledge of DevOps and best practices. Understanding of Major DevOps Tools and implementation for Source Control, Continuous Integration, Configuration Management, Deployment Automation, containers & Orchestration

• Experience in working in Agile framework.

• Good written and verbal communication skills.

Skills Desired:

• Financial markets, payment solutions or Wealth Management previous experience

Educational Qualification:

• Bachelor’s degree in Engineering preferred from an accredited college/university

Engineering Manager – Backend

Opportunity in this role / Why should you join us?

Series D funded supply chain startup.

Requirements

• Software engineering experience of greater than or equal to 7 years
• Experience managing a technical team of at least 3 people
• Exposure to consumer facing products
• Strong technical background and ability to contribute to design and review
• Familiarity with our tech stack or an analogous tech stack

Technologies Used

• Web application frameworks : Ktor, Spring Boot, Ruby on Rails, Node.js, Java Play, AWS Lambda
• Languages : Kotlin, Java, Ruby, Javascript, Python
• Datastores : PostgreSQL, Aerospike, Redis, DynamoDB, Amazon Redshift
• Communication : HTTP, Amazon SQS, Sidekiq, Amazon SNS
• Server management : Amazon ECS, Docker
• Design frameworks : Domain Driven Design, Clean Architecture, Layered Architecture

Roles and Responsibilities

This role requires a person to drive the engineering of a set of products by aligning with business and product

stakeholders and building and upskilling a team to aid in this. The responsibilities include:

Business and product alignment and planning

• Work closely with business and product stakeholders to understand and align with product initiatives and iterations.
• Help shape the engineering requirement by aligning with the product manager and fleshing out concepts and user flows.
• Formalize business requirements into roadmaps and sprints.

1. Product and system development

• Drive high level modeling and design for projects, also focusing on non-functional aspects, including but not limited to database design, communication protocols, deployment systems, etc.
• Drive adoption of design frameworks like domain driven design, clean architecture, etc., resulting in a robust layered architecture.
• Drive good code review practices, using the review process as a mentoring tool to upskill people.
• Ensure test coverage of systems, partly through unit and integration testing, and partly through blackbox testing by collaborating with the Quality Assurance team, via good testing practices.

1. Project Management

• Drive the execution of the project by delegating tasks effectively.
• Resolve blockers through technical expertise, negotiation and delegation.
• Estimate timelines and ensure adherence to them through effective sync-ups and course corrections.

1. Maintenance

• Formulate SLAs and oversee their adherence for the various systems, effectively tracking issues and performance inefficiencies.
• Performance monitoring and optimization for systems.
• Drive technical re-design, remodeling and refactoring of systems for robustness and sustainability.

1. Team Management

• Typically manage a team of 3 - 6 members and a portfolio of 3 - 6 products.
• Do periodic assessment of reportees, chart their career growth paths and train them.
• Recruit members into the team by collaborating effectively with the recruitment team.

Product Overview

You will be contributing to products concerning both customers and partner drivers. Product sectors

include:

• Growth : You’ll build tools to help boost user growth on the platform including our industry bestdriver on-boarding, training and certification system, referral system, and lead managementmmodels.
• Lifecycle Management : Build tools to help users engage with the platform better, which includes rewards and recognition module, subscription service, account management tools, partner and customer wallets and payout modules, and churn detection systems among others.
• Transaction Experience : You’ll help deliver the most delightful booking experience to our customers and drivers. As part of this team, you’ll be responsible for our core booking system, pricing and payment systems, location tracking and filtering services, fraud prevention systems, and in-app ticketing and support among others.
• Fulfilment : As part of the fulfilment team, you’ll work on systems which ensure high degree of ride fulfilment on the platform. Tools including allocation methodologies and system, dynamic pricing, dynamic partner routing, and partner re-activation tools among others.
• Enterprise Solutions : You’ll help Porter’s enterprise customers achieve delivery excellence. You’ll build tools for contract management, fleet management, fleet and route optimisation tools, alerting and monitoring tools, and analytics suite among others.

• Own development, design, scaling and maintenance of application and messaging engines that power the central platform of Capillary's Cloud CRM product. 
• Contribute to overall design and roadmap.
• Mentor Junior team members.

Required Skills:

• Innovative and self-motivated with passion to develop complex and scalable applications.
• 3-5 years of experience in software development with strong focus on algorithms and data structures.
• Strong coding and design skills with prior experience in developing scalable & high availability applications using Core Java/J2EE, Spring, Hibernate. 
• Work experience with Relational databases is required (Primarily MySQL)
• Prior work experience with Non-Relational databases (primarily Redis, MongoDb) is an added plus.
• Strong Analytical and Problem Solving Skills.
• BTech