Senior Database Developer

Core Responsibilities:

• Design & Development: Architect and implement scalable backend services and APIs using Python or Golang, ensuring high performance, resilience, and extensibility.
• System Ownership: Take end-to-end ownership of critical modules, from design and development to deployment and support.
• Technical Leadership: Conduct design and code reviews, enforce best practices, and mentor junior engineers to raise the team’s technical bar.
• Collaboration: Work closely with product managers, architects, and other engineers to translate business requirements into technical solutions.
• Performance & Reliability: Troubleshoot complex issues in production systems, identify root causes, and design sustainable long-term solutions.
• Innovation: Evaluate new technologies, contribute to proof-of-concepts, and recommend tools that can improve developer productivity.
• Process Improvement: Drive initiatives to improve coding standards, CI/CD pipelines, and automated testing practices.
• Knowledge Sharing: Document designs, create technical guides, and share insights with the broader engineering team.

Experience and Expertise:

• 4–7 years of backend development experience with Python or Golang.
• Strong expertise in designing, developing, and scaling microservices and distributed systems.
• Solid understanding of concurrency, multi-threading, and performance optimization.
• Proficiency with databases (SQL/NoSQL), caching systems (Redis, Memcached), and messaging systems (Kafka, RabbitMQ, etc.).
• Hands-on experience with Linux development, Docker, and Kubernetes.
• Familiarity with cloud platforms (AWS/GCP/Azure) and related services.
• Strong debugging, profiling, and optimization skills for production-grade systems.
• Experience with AI-powered development tools is a strong plus; familiarity with concepts like 'agentic coding' for workflow automation or 'context engineering' for leveraging LLMs in system design is highly desirable.

Skills:

• Strong problem-solving ability, with experience handling complex technical challenges.
• Ability to lead technical initiatives and mentor junior engineers.
• Excellent communication skills to collaborate with cross-functional teams and articulate trade-offs.
• Self-motivated, proactive, and able to operate independently while aligning with team goals.
• Passionate about engineering culture, quality, and developer productivity.

The Company:

We are a growing EV infrastructure startup with offices in IIT-Madras Research Park and Noida.

Sonik Mobility is a brand of our company Azhar Engineering incubated at IIT-Madras Research Park, which is primarily focused on developing and deploying smartest, lOT enabled and the most user-friendly EV charging stations and semi-autonomous battery swap stations in India ranging from 3.3 kW to 22 kw.

We are a company founded by two graduates and friends namely Mohammad Safa Azhar and Preak Gupta from The Pennsylvania State University, USA and are the only company providing the dual solution of charging and semi-autonomous battery swapping stations under one roof.

Our ideal candidate for this position must have a penchant to learn new things and above all must have a passion to change the status quo of EV charging infrastructure in India.

We believe that charging your EV should be as easy as refueling your ice vehicle if not easier.

The Position: We're looking for a Software Engineer/ Full Stack Developer to work on our application and integration with third party APIs.

Objectives:

We are looking for a Software Engineer/Back-end Developer to work on our cloud-hosted application & integrate with 3rd party APIs. This will include the following:

• Maintain and keep up-to-date our cloud-hosted application
• Collaborate with the rest of the team to ensure applications align with organizational goals.
• Oversee the performance of the application to ensure they're always running properly.

• Improve our overall application process and continuously find ways to advance our company vision.

Responsibilities: As a software engineer/ Back-end developer, these will be some of your responsibilities

• Work closely with our hardware integration team to integrate the application with our hardware.
• Ensure the application is hosted and fully functional on cloud (AWS).
• Work closely with NPCI for integration into our system via APIs.
• Carry out regular security and performance checks
• Assesses feasibility of design and project parameters within time and cost constraints.

Requirements:

• B-Tech/M-Tech in Computer Science/Electronics/Engineering
• Proven experience of 2-3 vears (professional or otherwise)
• Strong knowledge of programming languages such PHP, Python, C, or C++.
• Knowledge of API integrations with 3rd party applications/hardware
• Knowledge of software and hardware integration
• Experience with hosting applications on cloud (AWS or Azure)
• Working knowledge of software development tools and technologies
• Desired skills:
• Experience with Battery Management systems
• Experience with CAN
• Knowledge of OCPP protocol
• AWS experience preferred
• Strong communication and teamwork skills
• Contribute individually to product solution development.

Required Skills:

• 4+ year of experience in Development in JAVA technology.
• Strong Java Basics
• SpringBoot or Spring MVC
• Hands on experience on Relational Databases (SQL query or Hibernate) + Mongo (JSON parsing)
• Proficient in REST API development
• Messaging Queue (RabitMQ or Kafka)
• Microservices
• Any Caching Mechanism
• Good at problem solving

Good to Have Skills:

• 4+ years of experience in using Java/J2EE tech stacks
• Good understanding of data structures and algorithms.
• Excellent analytical and problem solving skills.
• Ability to work in a fast-paced internet start-up environment.
• Experience in technical mentorship/coaching is highly desirable.
• Understanding of AI/ML algorithms is a plus.

*Performs analysis of functional and business requirements

*Applies in-depth or broad technical knowledge to maintain data engineering functions performs solution design.

*Applies the company, open source, and 3rd party technologies to highly complex infrastructure and software solutions.

*Introduce new product features and enhance the platform

*Ability to translate business reporting requirements into a production report.

About us:

Strata is a commercial real estate investment platform that offers investors the opportunity to invest in pre-leased commercial assets such as offices, warehouses, and retail spaces across India.

We are one of the fastest-growing PropTech platforms in India and are backed by Elevation Capital, Mayfield, Kotak Investment Advisors, Gruhas (a venture by Nikhil Kamath of Zerodha) and DLF Family Office.

Our headquarter is in Bangalore, India.

We are a small yet close-knit team of 35+ people.

About you:

You have a knack for product and strongly equipped with engineering skills to make it a reality. You don’t jump into implementation unless you have clearly understood the problem/requirements and have a written design. You don’t hesitate asking questions and giving critical reviews while respecting others’ opinions. You are a fearless engineer, and not afraid to fail, not on production though ;) You have a strong sense of ownership. You have a startup experience. You don’t feel annoyed if required to work on off days in case of production incidents (no development).

Your responsibilities:

You will primarily work on the backend maintaining the existing platform and writing new enhancements and features. Apart from your own features, as a senior member of the team you will be expected to be actively involved in overall design discussions and peer code reviews. You will factor in extensibility, maintainability, scalability and security in designs and code. You will ensure that best engineering practices are followed. You will support your team members when they are facing challenges, and mentor them when appropriate. You will strive for overall engineering excellence.

Must-have Skills:

• 4-8 years of total experience
• 2+ years of experience in Django and DRF. You must be pro at it. The team will be looking up to you for making most out of DRF.
• Designing and building  scalable web applications
• Good understanding of REST principles
• SQL database design and queries
• Working knowledge of AWS

Good-To-Have Skills:

• Angular or any other JavaScript frontend framework
• Designing microservices
• DevOps experience

FAQ's.

1. Your technology ingredients?

Programming languages:
Our backend is written in Python using Django framework. And the frontend is in AngularJS. Currently there is no mobile app.

Infrastructure:
We are an AWS shop and use their services for most needs, Docker for containerization and ECS as orchestrator, RDS as database, S3 for storage and SQS as messaging backend.

Other tools:
BitBucket for Git and CI/CD pipeline, Trello for project management; and Google Meets and Slack for communication.

2. Your hiring plan?

Currently the engineering team comprises of 3 engineers, and we plan to grow it to 8 by the end of 2021.

3. Your Interview process?

We will try to finish the process within two weeks. In case we can’t go ahead with  your candidature, we will clearly and immediately let you know. But in case of competing applications, we may request you to wait for a week or two.

1. 15 minutes introductory call to discuss requirements and expectations
2. 30 minutes online coding assignment on a screen sharing session
3. 1 hour technical interview covering problem solving, code review and aptitude
4. 15 minutes call with co-founder for final discussion

In case of inability to come to a conclusion from either side, we may go for an additional round.

4. Your WFH and WFO policy?

Due to Covid-19 the team is working from home and will continue till March-2022. After that we will work from the Bangalore or Pune office (yet to be finalised). You should be open to relocate to any of the cities.

5. Your funding status?

In March 2020, Strata raised $1.5 million in seed funding; and $6 million in Series-A in July 2021.

• Exp- 3+ yrs
• Must be very good in Java- 2.5+ yrs
• At least 1 yr of working experience in any one DB of Neo4j, Cassandra, Elastic Search
• Should have good devops working knowledge - Knowledge of AWS, Ansibleetc is a necessity
• Experience in TDD/BDD is required
• Minimum 1 yr working experience in Samza& Kafka.
• Knowledge of Azure is added advantage
• Understanding of AKKA and Play framework