Software Engineer

About The Trend Lab
The Trend Lab tracks the shifts shaping what comes next across business, technology, markets, culture, and consumer behavior.
We take a large volume of noisy signals and turn it into clear, practical perspectives people can use to make better decisions. Our team works across disciplines to follow emerging developments and what they actually mean for industries and communities.
The Role
We are hiring a Software Engineer to build the machinery behind the research.
TTL's product is judgment, but judgment needs raw material. Someone has to pull in signals from a lot of messy sources, resolve them into something structured, make them searchable, and give our analysts tools that surface what matters instead of burying them in volume. That is this job.
Most of your work will be backend and data: ingestion pipelines, the APIs and services around them, the storage and search layer underneath, and the internal applications our analysts live in every day. Increasingly, that includes LLM-assisted summarization, classification, and retrieval, where the interesting problem is not calling a model but knowing when to trust the output.
Your users sit next to you. Analysts will tell you directly when a tool is slow, wrong, or hiding the thing they needed, which is the fastest feedback loop an engineer can have.
What You Will Do
* Build and maintain the pipelines that pull signal data from external sources and keep it flowing.
* Design and build backend services and APIs on top of that data.
* Work on the storage, search, and retrieval layer that makes a large corpus usable.
* Build the internal tools analysts use to explore, tag, and write from the data.
* Develop features backed by LLMs for summarization, classification, and retrieval, and build the checks that keep them honest.
* Integrate external data providers and platforms.
* Own quality through tests, code review, monitoring, and debugging what breaks.
* Contribute to architecture decisions and document them.
* Work directly with analysts, product, and design to turn a research need into a working tool.
What You Will Need
* 2 to 5 years of professional software engineering experience, with production systems you have shipped and maintained.
* Strong fundamentals in data structures, algorithms, and software design.
* Proficiency in Python, JavaScript or TypeScript, Java, Go, or a comparable modern language.
* Solid backend experience, including REST APIs and databases.
* Comfort working with data at volume, including pipelines and messy external sources.
* Fluency with Git and collaborative development workflows.
* Clear communication with people who are not engineers, since your users are researchers.
* The self-direction to work well on a distributed team.
* A bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
Nice to Have
* Data engineering experience: ETL, workflow orchestration, or streaming.
* Search and retrieval work, including full-text search, vector search, or ranking.
* Applications built on LLMs, especially retrieval and evaluation rather than prompting alone.
* Web scraping, feed ingestion, or working with unreliable external data sources.
* Cloud platforms such as AWS, GCP, or Azure, plus Docker and CI/CD.
* Experience building internal tools for a research or editorial team.
* Genuine interest in trends, emerging technology, and how innovation lands in the real world.
Why This Role
You will build the systems that decide what our researchers can see. That is unusual leverage for an engineer, and it is a domain where the hard problems are real: separating signal from noise at volume, keeping a large corpus fast and searchable, and using models without letting them quietly invent things.
If you are the kind of person who reads about a new technology because you want to know where it goes, you will be building for people who do that professionally.
Working Here
Remote, based in India. You choose where you work from.
Compensation is ₹12,00,000 to ₹18,00,000 per annum, set by experience and demonstrated engineering ability.

Work arrangement
Yes