About the role
We are hiring a Backend Software Engineer to design and run the services that move transactions across the ONDC network. You will own systems end-to-end: design, code, test, deploy, and the dashboards that wake someone up at 2 a. m. You will work alongside a small, senior team and have a disproportionate impact on what India's open commerce stack feels like for millions of merchants. This role is for an engineer who has shipped backend services at India scale, has strong opinions on distributed systems trade-offs, and uses AI-assisted tooling as a lever, not as a crutch.
Responsibilities:
- Design and operate the services, pipelines, data layer, and contracts that move l traffic across the ONDC network at India scale while maintaining p99 latency less than 200 ms.
- Write the tests that matter: unit, contract, integration against real dependencies, and load tests that prove the SLA.
- Own deployment and operability: CI/CD pipelines, blue-green and canary rollouts, feature flags, structured logs, metrics, traces, and runbooks.
- Be on a healthy on-call rotation. Lead post-incident reviews and turn each one into a code or process change.
- Use AI coding assistants thoughtfully to move faster on boilerplate, scaffolding, refactors, and tests while staying fully accountable for what lands in main.
- Mentor junior engineers, review PRs with rigor, and raise the quality bar by example.
Requirements:
- 4-6 years building production backend systems, with at least 2 years on services that handle high RPS and tight latency budgets.
- StrongGo (or a comparable systems language with a willingness to ramp up on Go fast). You can reason about routines, channels, context cancellation, and the GC.
- Solid distributed systems fundamentals: consistency vs. availability, idempotency, retries, backoff, dead-letter queues, leader election, eventual consistency.
- Hands-on production experience, not just tutorials, with Kafka (or a similar log-based broker) and PostgreSQL, with judgment on when REST is the right answer instead, running on containers and Kubernetes on at least one major cloud (AWS / GCP / Azure).
- Observability literacy (Prometheus / Grafana / OpenTelemetry / structured logging) and the habit of instrumenting before shipping.
- Demonstrable judgment on AI-assisted coding: knows when to use it and when not to and reviews generated code as carefully as their own.
- Comfortable working in-office in Delhi NCR alongside a hands-on engineering team.
Nice to have:
- Exposure to open networks or interoperable protocols like Beckn, UPI, Account Aggregator, ONDC participant work, or similar.
- Experience with service meshes, API gateways, and edge rate-limiting at scale.
- Background in payments, logistics, e-commerce, or other domains with strict consistency and audit requirements.
- Open-source contributions, technical blogging, or talks at engineering conferences.
- Familiarity with chaos engineering and progressive delivery practices.