Staff Software Engineer

Location: Bangalore

Department: Engineering

Reports to: SVP

Experience required: 6+ years

About Tracxn:

Tracxn (Tracxn.com) is a Bangalore-based product company providing a research and deal sourcing platform for Venture Capital, Private Equity, Corp Dev, and professionals working around the startup ecosystem.

We are a team of 600+ working professionals serving customers across the globe. Our clients include Funds like Andreessen Horowitz, Matrix Partners, GGV Capital, and Large Corporations such as Citi, Embraer & Ferrero.

Founders

• Neha Singh (ex-Sequoia, BCG | MBA - Stanford GSB)
• Abhishek Goyal (ex-Accel Partners, Amazon | BTech - IIT Kanpur)

About Technology Team: 

Tracxn's Technology team is 60+ members strong and growing. The technology team is subdivided into multiple smaller teams, each owning one or more services/components of the technology platform. Ours is a young team of motivated engineers with a minimal management structure where almost everyone is actively involved in technical development and design activities. We have a team-centric culture where the ownership and responsibility of a feature or module lie with a team compared to an individual.

We value ownership, continuous learning, consistency, and discipline as a team.

Our Tech Stacks:

We work on an array of technologies, including but not limited to backend and frontend systems such as Java, Python, Spring Boot, Node.js, ReactJS, Next.js, Webpack, and Storybook; cloud and serverless platforms like AWS, etc; data and infrastructure technologies such as Elastic Stack (Elasticsearch), MongoDB, MySQL, Redis, Kafka, and Ansible; large-scale web crawling solutions; modern data pipelines and ETL workflows; and AI/ML-driven projects.

Job Overview:

We are looking for experienced software engineers with 6+ years of overall software development experience, including backend development and proven people-management skills. The ideal candidate will lead the engineering team(s), drive technical excellence, and ensure timely delivery of high-quality software solutions.

Job Responsibilities:

• Lead, mentor, and manage a team of software engineers
• Own technical planning, architecture discussions, and execution
• Collaborate with product managers and stakeholders
• Drive best practices in software development, testing, and deployment
• Conduct code reviews and ensure high engineering standards
• Manage delivery timelines, resource planning, and technical risks
• Support hiring, onboarding, and performance management of engineers

Job Requirements :

Professional Experience

•  Proven experience leading or managing software engineering teams
• Track record of delivering complex, scalable software systems
• Experience driving technical initiatives and influencing architectural decisions
• Strong collaboration experience with product, design, and cross-functional teams.

Technical Leadership & Management

•  Ability to mentor, coach, and grow engineers across different experience levels
• Experience conducting performance reviews and providing technical feedback
• Strong ownership of team delivery, timelines, and quality
• Experience balancing hands-on technical work with people management

Backend & System Architecture Expertise

• Strong proficiency in modern backend architectures, design patterns, and microservices architecture.
• Proficiency in at least one server-side programming language (e.g., Java, Python, etc.)
• Solid understanding of API design principles and implementation
• Hands-on experience with relational and non-relational databases and knowledge of data pipelines and data warehousing concepts.

Technical Competencies

• Strong system design and problem-solving skills
• Knowledge of caching strategies, performance optimization, and scalability
• Understanding of data modeling and query optimization
• Familiarity with search and indexing technologies
• Understanding of security best practices in backend systems

Culture:

• Work with performance-oriented teams driven by ownership and passion.
• Learn to design systems for high accuracy, efficiency, and scalability.
• No strict deadlines, focus on delivering quality work.
• Meritocracy-driven, candid culture. No politics.
• Very high visibility regarding which startups and markets are exciting globally.

About the role

We are hiring a Principal Engineer to own the hardest technical problems in our product and see them through from first sketch to stable production. You will set technical direction, design systems that scale, and raise the engineering bar through your own work and the people around you. This is a hands-on leadership role: you write code, review designs, and ship.

What will you do?

You will own outcomes, not just tasks. Expect to spend your time on the following.

• Own projects end to end. Take an ambiguous problem, shape the requirements, design the solution, break down the work, deliver it to production, and stay accountable for how it runs afterwards.

• Lead system design. Author and review architecture for services, data pipelines and integrations, with clear trade-offs on scale, latency, cost, consistency and reliability.

• Write and review critical code. Build the hardest components yourself, and set standards for code quality, testing and maintainability through code and design reviews.

• Own deployment and operations. Design CI/CD, infrastructure and release strategies. Drive observability, on-call readiness, incident response and post-incident learning.

• Solve hard problems. Debug production issues across the stack, and find root causes in performance, concurrency, data and scaling problems.

• Mentor and multiply. Coach senior and junior engineers, grow future tech leads, and make the whole team faster and more confident.

• Partner across functions. Work with product, design, data and business teams to turn goals into technical plans, and to say no or reshape scope when needed.

• Shape technical strategy. Guide build-versus-buy decisions, manage tech debt, evaluate new technologies, and contribute to the engineering roadmap.

• Raise the bar. Help define engineering practices, hiring standards and culture, and take part in interviewing.

What are we looking for?

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

Core engineering

• 10+ years of professional software engineering, with a track record of shipping and running production systems.

• Strong computer science fundamentals: data structures, algorithms and complexity, operating systems, networking, databases and concurrency.

• Fluency in at least one major backend language (for example Python, Go, Java, or Node.js/ TypeScript) and the ability to pick up others quickly.

• Deep knowledge of relational and NoSQL data stores: schema design, indexing, transactions, query tuning and replication.

System design and problem solving

• Proven ability to design distributed systems that are scalable, fault tolerant and cost aware, and to explain the trade-offs clearly.

• Experience with APIs, event-driven and asynchronous architectures, queues, caching and service-to-service communication.

• A structured approach to ambiguous problems: break them down, test assumptions, decide with incomplete data, and measure results.

• Strong debugging instincts, including performance profiling and production troubleshooting.

Delivery and operations

• Have led at least two significant projects from inception to production, including planning, milestones, risk management and launch.

• Hands-on experience with deployment: CI/CD pipelines, containers (Docker, Kubernetes), a major cloud (AWS, GCP or Azure), and infrastructure as code.

• Practical experience with monitoring, logging, alerting, SLOs and incident management.

• Habit of writing tests and automation, and of leaving systems more reliable than you found them.

Leadership and communication

• Experience leading engineers without formal authority, through influence, mentoring and clear technical writing.

• Excellent written and verbal communication: design docs, RFCs and concise updates to non-technical stakeholders.

• Ownership mindset, sound judgment on priorities, and comfort working in a fast-moving environment.

Nice to have

• Experience in fintech, lending or another regulated, data-heavy domain.

• Exposure to AI/ML or LLM-based systems in production: model serving, evaluation, retrieval, and cost and latency management.

• Deep experience with data engineering: streaming, batch pipelines, warehouses or search systems.

• Security and compliance awareness: authentication, encryption, audit trails, secure SDLC.

• Experience with multi-tenant SaaS, high-throughput systems or zero downtime migrations.

• Open-source contributions, conference talks, or technical writing.

• Experience scaling an engineering team or helping set up hiring and onboarding practices.

ABOUT THE ROLE

The Principal Software Engineer – Java will play a pivotal role in designing, developing, mentoring and maintaining high-performance IT system for Hapag-Lloyd. The role requires deep expertise in Java and microservices-based architecture, along with a strong focus on code quality, performance, and scalability. The ideal candidate will be a passionate engineer who thrives in a Java development agile environment and brings a solution-oriented mindset to collaborative product development. As a senior technical expert, you will be responsible for low-level and high-level architectural design, mentoring developers, and working closely with team in Hamburg & Chennai. The ideal candidate is a passionate, solution oriented engineer with a proven track record in leading technical projects within an agile environment.

WORK EXPERIENCE:

9–14 years of hands-on experience in development using Java, JEE, JPA, JUnit, Kafka, and Microservices. Good Experience in AWS. Strong experience in architectural design – both low-level and high-level. Experience building distributed systems and working in microservices-based architecture. Proficient with Kafka and message-driven architecture. Strong experience with relational databases (e.g., PostgreSQL). Sound understanding of modern DevOps practices, including CI/CD pipelines, containerization, and cloud deployment. Experience working in Agile/Scrum-based teams with exposure to software lifecycle tools (e.g., Git, Jenkins, JIRA).

Technical Skills Java, JEE, JPA, JUnit, Microservices Kafka (Desired), REST API development SQL, PostgreSQL Git, Maven, Jenkins (Desired), Familiarity with Docker, Kubernetes, and cloud platforms (eg. AWS)

EDUCATION & QUALIFICATIONS Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Engineering, or related discipline

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES & TASKS

Software Development & Design Design and develop scalable, reliable, and high-performance applications using Java, JPA, Kafka, Microservices, Junit, API and PostgreSQL. Lead low-level and high-level design discussions and decisions for scalable architecture. Build and maintain microservices architecture using industry best practices. Drive technology innovation. Write clean, efficient, well-documented code with high unit test coverage using JUnit.

Mentorship :

Mentor and guide developers and team members in coding standards, best practices, and problem-solving. Conduct regular code reviews, peer programming, and provide technical leadership to ensure code quality and continuous improvement.

Systems Integration & Tools:

Work with messaging systems such as Kafka to build real-time data processing services. Implement and optimize data access using SQL /PostgreSQL databases. Participate in the design and implementation of DevOps pipelines for CI/CD.

Quality, Testing & Documentation:

Conduct regular code reviews and participate in peer programming and Peer coding Review. Perform system testing, validation, and verification across development stages. Contribute to technical documentation throughout the software development lifecycle

Agile Collaboration & Continuous Improvement:

Collaborate closely with Product Managers, Engineering Managers, Scrum Masters, and developers in agile teams. Participate in sprint planning, retrospectives, and demos. Remain current on new technologies and drive adoption of best engineering practices across the team.

BEHAVIOURS & APPROACH

Strong analytical and problem-solving skills Team-oriented with excellent communication and collaboration skills Passion for clean code, architecture, and continuous learning Ability to work independently with a proactive approach to problem-solving

Role & Responsibilities

Responsibilities

• Business: Immerse in operations until you think like an insider.

Rapidly acquire domain expertise through direct observation, translate between business and engineering seamlessly, and mentor engineers in your area on immersion. Influence senior stakeholders effectively, manage complex stakeholder landscapes with competing agendas, and build trust rapidly with new stakeholders.

• Delivery: Lead rapid delivery initiatives across teams in your area, coach on prototype-first approaches, and establish trust through consistent fast delivery. Build complete applications rapidly across any technology stack, select the right tools for each problem, and define clear criteria for prototype-to-production transitions.

• Generative AI: Architect RAG systems for complex use cases across teams, implement advanced techniques (hybrid search, reranking, query expansion), mentor engineers on RAG best practices, and establish RAG standards. Lead evaluation strategy across teams, establishing annotation guidelines, training human-calibrated LLM judges, and building evaluation pipelines that connect tracing to datasets to experiments.

• People: Build high-performing teams across your area, navigate complex interpersonal dynamics, foster psychological safety, and create environments where diverse perspectives are valued. Influence through communication at all levels — from frontline to executive. Handle difficult conversations skilfully and train engineers in your area on effective communication.

• AI-Augmented Development: Optimise AI tool usage across teams in your area, train engineers on AI-augmented and agentic engineering workflows, evaluate new AI development tools, and establish practices that balance AI speed with verification rigour.

• Scale: Design complex multi-component systems end-to-end, evaluate architectural options for large initiatives across teams, guide technical decisions for your area, and mentor engineers on architecture. Create debt reduction strategies across teams, influence roadmap decisions to include debt work, and teach engineers when to accept debt for speed versus when to invest in quality.

• Documentation: Define documentation standards across teams in your area, create documentation systems and templates, train engineers on spec-driven development, and ensure documentation quality across projects. Lead pattern generalization initiatives, defining criteria for when to generalize versus keep custom.

• Reliability: Define reliability standards across teams in your area, drive post-incident improvements systematically, design capacity planning processes, andmentor engineers on SRE practices.

Ideal Candidate

• Strong Staff Software Engineer / FDE profile (full-stack + production GenAI, multi-team technical leadership)
• Mandatory (Experience 1) – Must have 7+ years of relevant professional software engineering experience, with demonstrated full-stack delivery across backend and frontend.
• Mandatory (Experience 2) – Must have deep production experience with Python AND JavaScript/TypeScript, working comfortably across the full stack.
• Mandatory (Experience 3) – Must have 2+ years of experience in generative AI applications developement — LLM integrations, vector databases, RAG systems, and evaluation pipelines
• Mandatory (Experience 4) – Must have strong experience with modern frontend frameworks (Next.js / React) and backend API development.
• Mandatory (Experience 5) – Must have extensive experience with cloud platforms (AWS preferred; Azure/GCP valued), including infrastructure-as-code (CloudFormation / Terraform).
• Mandatory (Experience 6) – Must have working knowledge of multiple database paradigms — relational (PostgreSQL), document, and key-value (Redis) — with ability to select the right storage per problem.
• Mandatory (Experience 7) – Must have strong experience with CI/CD pipelines (e.g. GitHub Actions), containerization, and production deployment strategies.
• Mandatory (Experience 8) – Must have demonstrable fluency with AI coding tools (Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, or similar) and proven ability to design agentic engineering workflows and train teams on them
• Preferred (Experience) – Advanced RAG techniques — hybrid search, reranking, query expansion — and establishing RAG standards across teams