Senior Software Engineer / Lead Software Engineer - Backend

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.

The requirements are as follows:

1) Familiar with the the Django REST API Framework.

2) Experience with the FAST API framework will be a plus

3) Strong grasp of basic python programming concepts ( We do ask a lot of questions on this on our interviews :) )

4) Experience with databases like MongoDB , Postgres , Elasticsearch , REDIS will be a plus

5) Experience with any ML library will be a plus.

6) Familiarity with using git , writing unit test cases for all code written and CI/CD concepts will be a plus as well.

7) Familiar with basic code patterns like MVC.

8) Grasp on basic data structures.

Skill required:)

• Expert in writing clean, test-driven, easily maintainable, and modular code.
• Having a good working knowledge of database design and maintenance.
• Able to build reusable code and libraries for future use.
• Knowing troubleshooting and debugging applications is essential.
• Should have great performance in UI or backend tests to optimize performance.
• Capable of designing and developing web applications for the PHP platform (Laravel)
• Preferred to collaborate with cross-functional teams to define, design, and ship new features.
• Able to ensure the performance, quality, and responsiveness of web applications.
• Having sound working knowledge of identifying and correcting bottlenecks and fixing bugs.
• Able to work on bug fixing and improving application performance
• Able to constantly discover, evaluate, and implement new technologies to maximize development efficiency.

The Risk team is responsible for overall risk framework and strategy for the organization. The team develops various risk models, arrives at various sector reports from a risk perspective and provides in depth analysis and recommendation around risk profiles of various clients.

In this role, the person is responsible for playing a leadership role in the Risk function to identify, assess, monitor and make timely and measured judgments on all current and potential future risks faced, in order to protect the organization’s interest, assets and reputation of the group along with growing shareholder value and profitability.

Responsibilities

• Manage risk for the retail and wholesale portfolio. Should have managed organization level Risk Policies, Credit Underwriting and Collection functions.
• Manage risk framework for the organization - including updating, establishing new risk management mechanisms, to identify, assess, monitor, measure and control a broad spectrum of risks. Ensure all policies and frameworks are kept updated and deployed to the optimum level.
• Develop continuous monitoring and improvement of the quality of the organization's credit and lending portfolio through credit policy direction and implementation.
• Possess a complete understanding the business. Evaluate, improve, and monitor the business, including assisting in reporting to the Board and Board Committees and providing leadership in the effectiveness of credit risk management controls, systems, and processes across the organization.
• Lead and mentor a team of analysts.

• Possess 7+ years of relevant experience in financial services industry in a risk role.
• Exposure to both wholesale and retail risk in a banking environment will be preferred. Some experience in a business / sales role within the banking / NBFC space will be an added advantage.
• Should have held a position of authority in terms of allocation and appropriating limits.
• Sector understanding in financial institution space and good knowledge of interpreting financial trends.
• High proficiency in Python and SQL/NoSQL.
• Experience with big data and cloud computing e.g., PySpark, data lake is a plus.
• Outstanding written, verbal and interpersonal communication skills.
• Ability to speak at various levels of an organization (CXOs to analysts).
• Have demonstrated resilience – stayed with companies and taking businesses to scale, have preferably not ‘hopped jobs. Strong organizational skills and excellent follow-through.
• Present / articulate / position an idea compellingly and ability to work in a fast-paced dynamic environment.
• Excellent communication and presentation skills.
• Takes personal ownership; Self-starter; Ability to drive projects with minimal guidance and focus on high impact work.
• Learns continuously; Seeks out knowledge, ideas and feedback.