Sr. SDE - III - Backend

Responsibilities:
Drive feature strategy alongside product, break down complex product bets into phased technical plans and lead execution across the team.
Own the full lifecycle of major product features: scoping, technical design, cross-team coordination, delivery, and post-launch iteration.
Architect and evolve our backend platform across Node.js/TypeScript and Python services on AWS, making decisions on service boundaries, data flow, resilience, and scale.
Own end-to-end delivery of large, ambiguous projects from scoping and design through rollout and operational stability Design and maintain our data layer spanning PostgreSQL, DynamoDB, Elasticsearch, and Athena; own the lightweight data warehouse strategy, including schema design, query optimisation, and data pipeline reliability.
Define and enforce infrastructure-as-code practices with Terraform; drive containerisation and orchestration standards with Docker and Kubernetes.
Lead the technical approach to AI-native product development, agentic orchestration, LLM integration patterns, tool-use architectures, and real-time voice systems.
Champion secure engineering practices across the team; establish standards for auth (OAuth/JWT/RBAC), input validation, secrets management, dependency scanning, OWASP compliance, and data privacy.
Set engineering standards for code quality, testing, observability, and incident response.
Mentor SDE-1s and SDE-2s through design reviews, code reviews, and pairing; raise the bar on engineering culture.
Be a force multiplier: identify bottlenecks (technical and process), propose solutions, and unblock the team.
Requirements:
5+ years of backend engineering experience with deep expertise in TypeScript/Node.js (NestJS, Express) and strong Python proficiency.
Proven track record of designing and scaling distributed systems in production on AWS.
Strong multi-database fluency: You've architected systems across relational (PostgreSQL), NoSQL (DynamoDB), search (Elasticsearch), and analytical stores (Athena) and can reason about when to use what.
Hands-on with Terraform, Docker, and Kubernetes: you've set up and maintained production infrastructure, not just used it.
Experience managing data at scale, schema evolution, ETL/ELT patterns, query performance, and lightweight warehouse maintenance.
Strong security posture - experience designing secure systems end-to-end, including auth architectures, threat modelling, secure CI/CD pipelines, and compliance-aware data handling.
Deep understanding of the AI landscape: LLMs, agentic patterns, function calling, RAG, embeddings - and the ability to translate that into engineering decisions
Awareness of GCP and Azure architectures even if AWS is your primary.
Strong opinions on system design, loosely held; you make architectural trade-offs explicit and drive alignment across teams.
Startup tempo; you ship fast without cutting corners on what matters.

Experience
5-9 yrs