Software Development Engineer II (Backend)

Location: Gurugram, India

Department: Engineering

Experience: 3 - 6 Years

About GoKwik

Why This Role Matters

What You'll Own

• Design & Delivery - Own the design and delivery of app-store and developer-platform services: write low-level and high-level designs, decide on APIs, data models and failure handling, and document the reasoning.
• OAuth & Token Lifecycle - Own OAuth 2.0 flows end to end: authorisation code with PKCE, refresh and rotation, revocation, scope enforcement and the failure modes of each.
• Public APIs - Build and version public APIs that external developers integrate against, with deprecation paths, contract tests and changelogs that never break live integrations.
• Webhook Delivery at Scale - Design and operate webhooks with HMAC signing, replay protection, retries with backoff, dead-letter handling, ordering guarantees and consumer back-pressure.
• Event-Driven Systems - Design and run Kafka flows: partitioning, ordering, idempotent consumers, retries, dead-letter handling and consumer lag.
• App Lifecycle - Own registration, review, publish, install and uninstall, and the data and permissions each transition must leave behind.
• Multi-Tenant Database Performance - Drive tenant-scoped queries, tenant-leading indexes, partitioning and safe expand-then-contract migrations.
• Caching & Rate Limiting - Use Redis deliberately for caching, distributed locking and per-app / per-merchant rate limiting.
• Production Reliability - Own SLOs and alerts, on-call and incident response, root-cause analysis with observability and APM tooling, and lasting fixes.
• AI-Ready Platform - Design APIs and tool definitions (for example, MCP servers) that LLM agents can use safely, with scoped permissions, rate limits and abuse controls.
• AI Developer Experience - Build LLM-backed features where they help, such as app-review assistance, docs search or integration debugging, with evals and guardrails.
• Reviews & Mentoring - Review critical changes, mentor SDE 1 engineers, and use AI tools across the loop while verifying everything they produce.

Who You Are

• 3+ years of backend engineering with strong Node.js and TypeScript, with hands-on ownership of production services.
• Strong low-level design and working high-level design: you explain constraints, choose an approach and make accountable decisions.
• Multi-tenant data isolation in practice: tenant scoping on every query, cache key, job and webhook, and how to prevent and detect cross-tenant leaks.
• Deep relational database skills (MySQL / PostgreSQL): data modelling, transactions and isolation, indexing, reading query plans and fixing slow queries at scale.
• Designed and shipped APIs consumed by external parties, including versioning, deprecation and backward compatibility.
• Production experience with OAuth 2.0 or similar token-based authorisation, and a security mindset around tokens, scopes and secrets.
• Hands-on Kafka or a similar broker: consumer groups, ordering, at-least-once delivery, idempotency, dead-letter queues and lag monitoring.
• Distributed-systems fundamentals: idempotency, retries and backoff, rate limiting, backpressure and consistency trade-offs.
• Real production ownership: on-call, debugging live incidents, root-cause analysis, and monitoring with logs, metrics and traces.
• Solid understanding of LLM systems: tool/function calling, RAG and vector search, evals, guardrails, prompt injection, and the security implications of letting AI agents call platform APIs.
• Uses AI coding tools daily and productively, with the judgement to verify, test and own generated code.
• Clear design documentation and technical communication, with experience reviewing others' work and mentoring.
• Treats an external contract as a promise and plans its change before it is needed; writes down the failure mode, such as what happens if a process crashes between the API call and the commit.
• Leads with data, acts early without waiting to be asked, and owns outcomes beyond your own tickets.

Why GoKwik