Tech Lead - Backend

Location: Bengaluru, India

Department: Engineering

Experience: 8 - 10

About this role

What you'll own:

• Design and build core platform services that handle complex business logic reliably at scale
• Architect and own integrations with external enterprise systems, each with their own quirks, rate limits, and failure modes
• Build APIs that enterprise engineering teams actually want to integrate with, not just ones that technically work
• Own production debugging end to end: diagnose issues across services using logs, traces, and metrics, and make incidents boring rather than fires
• Embed security and compliance thinking into your systems by default, not as a retrofit
• Mentor the Senior Backend Engineers in your pod: pair on hard problems, review their work, and help them grow as engineers
• Set the architectural direction for your domain: choose the frameworks, patterns, and abstractions the team builds on, and make the calls that shape the platform for years
• Lead design reviews and code reviews, and set the technical standard the rest of the team calibrates against
• Hold a clear bar for quality, follow-through, and ownership across the engineers you work with, and make sure work is healthy in production, not just merged
• Partner with product, implementation, and customer success as the engineer who understands the system deeply enough to push back when requirements are wrong
• Raise the bar for the engineers around you without slowing the team down

The impact you'll make:

• The systems and frameworks you set up become the foundation the rest of the backend team builds on
• Architectural decisions you make now will define how the platform scales over the next several years
• You will shorten the time from new enterprise requirement to production-ready system, enabling the company to move faster without breaking things
• You will raise the engineering quality bar for the team through the standards you set, the reviews you run, and the code you ship
• You will work on problems that don't have obvious solutions and your judgment will determine the outcome

Must have:

• 6–8 years of professional software development experience building production systems at real companies
• CS degree or equivalent (B.Tech/B.E./B.S.), strong fundamentals in data structures, algorithms, OS, and networking
• Can describe the hard problems they have solved, why they were difficult, and what changed as a result, not just a list of technologies used
• Deep proficiency in at least one backend language; language matters less than depth and engineering judgment
• Strong system design instincts: can reason through tradeoffs, failure modes, and long-term maintainability under pressure
• Has set technical direction before: defined architecture, frameworks, or standards that other engineers built on, not just owned their own slice
• Has driven quality and accountability across a team, formally

Good to have:

• Hands-on observability: comfortable diagnosing complex issues across distributed services using logs, traces, and performance metrics, not just setting up dashboards
• Security and compliance awareness (SOC 2, DPDPA, or similar) with a grasp of the engineering implications, not just the checkbox
• Experience with event-driven architectures: Kafka, NATS, or RabbitMQ in production
• Cloud platform experience (AWS preferred), deploying and operating services at scale
• Early-stage startup experience: comfortable with ambiguity, evolving requirements, and wearing multiple hats
• Background in multi-tenant enterprise software: external integrations, enterprise workflows
• Strong testing culture: unit, integration, and e2e as a default, not an afterthought
• Containerization and CI/CD: Docker, Kubernetes, GitHub Actions
• Uses AI coding tools like Cursor or GitHub Copilot to move faster without compromising quality
• Experience with financial systems, billing platforms, or fintech applications
• API design and integration experience

What drives you

• You can go deep on the hard problems you have solved: the why, the tradeoffs, the outcome
• You ask 'what happens when this fails?' before shipping anything
• You own problems, not tasks: you follow through until the system is healthy, not just until the PR is merged
• You set direction without taking over: you make the engineers around you better instead of becoming the single point of knowledge
• You have strong opinions on system design but hold them loosely: you change your mind when the evidence does
• You thrive in a fast-moving environment where the requirements evolve and the answers aren't always obvious
• Not taking yourself too seriously :)

Location

• Hybrid - 2 days per week
• Office Location: Indiranagar, Bengaluru.
• Address: 3rd Floor, A wing No 1, Carlton Towers, HAL Old Airport Rd, HAL 2nd Stage, Indiranagar, Bengaluru, Karnataka 560008.

Interview Process

• R0 – Recruiter Screening: Quick conversation to assess basic fit and role expectations.
• Round 1 - Introductory Chat: Focused on your career journey, key projects, technical depth, ownership, decision-making, and the impact you've driven in previous roles. We recommend reviewing the job description & CEO’s recorded videos before this step.
• Round 2 – System Design (HLD & LLD):
  • High-Level Design (HLD): Evaluates your ability to architect scalable, reliable systems and make sound trade-offs.
  • Low-Level Design (LLD): Assesses detailed design thinking, code structure, maintainability, and implementation choices.
• Reference Checks: We request contact details of two former direct managers. The hiring manager will connect with them to better understand your working style and alignment with Zenskar’s culture.
• Round 3 - Bar Raiser: Focuses on leadership, team collaboration, stakeholder management, engineering judgment, execution, and overall fit with Zenskar's culture and expectations. This serves as the final bar-raiser discussion.