Tech Lead (Backend)

Location: Bengaluru, India

Department: Engineering

Experience: 5 - 8

About Zenskar

Funding

The Problem We're Solving

What Customers Say

"We're saving 200+ hours/quarter on invoicing and receivables by completely automating our recurring billing."

— Noy Kalansky, Finance Controller, Pontera

"Zenskar automates revenue recognition accurately for our value-based billing: agents reducing manual hours by 70%."

— Matt Barnard, VP Finance, Vertice

"Zenskar’s agents automated 90% of our billing, integrated with our CRM, and accelerated revenue collection by a month."

— Ming Lui, VP Finance, Yembo

"Sardine had spent 4 years running billing in-house for high-volume, usage-based pricing. Zenskar took care of it all."

— Sardine team

"We launched our product 4 months faster instead of building an in-house system for our usage-based pricing."

— Kshitij Gupta, CEO, 100ms

About the role

What you'll do

• Turn an ambiguous ask like "the customer wants milestone-based pricing" into interfaces, edge cases, failure modes, and a real migration path
• Design for money correctness by default: idempotency, reconciliation, rounding, proration, audit trail, replay. Assume the system will be wrong somewhere and build in how you'd detect it
• Name and quantify technical debt, and negotiate real bandwidth to address it, rather than silently absorbing it or refactoring unilaterally
• Make the engineers around you measurably better: pair on hard problems, review their work, and be able to point to someone who grew because of you
• Push back on a bad technical decision made by someone more senior than you, when you're right, and make it stick
• Stay hands-on: write and review code at a high bar, day to day, not just in review comments
• Work design and product into your technical plans as you build them, not around them after the fact
• Own production debugging end to end: diagnose across services using logs, traces, and metrics, and make incidents boring instead of fires
• Set architectural direction for your domain: the frameworks, patterns, and abstractions the team builds on for years
• Hold a technical bar in interview loops, and shape who joins the team, without owning the headcount decision
• Stay current on the industry through real people and sources, and be able to name a decision of yours that changed because of something you learned recently

Who you are

• 5 to 8 years of professional software development experience building production systems at real companies
• CS degree or equivalent, with strong fundamentals in data structures, algorithms, OS, and networking
• Can take an ambiguous, underspecified problem to a defensible technical plan, interfaces and edge cases included, not just a box diagram
• Thinks in idempotency, reconciliation, rounding, proration, audit trail, and replay, and designs to catch the failure that would otherwise go unnoticed for a quarter
• Has named a piece of technical debt, quantified it, and negotiated time to fix it, rather than suffering silently or refactoring without asking
• Has a specific person who is better today because of them, and a real account of reversing a bad technical decision made by someone more senior that stayed reversed
• Still writes and reviews code at a high bar, day to day, this isn't a design-only role
• Has worked design and product into a technical plan, and can describe a time they changed the plan based on it
• Has a real, standing way of staying current in the industry, and can tie a specific decision of theirs to something they learned recently
• Has held a technical bar in a hiring loop under pressure to fill a seat, even without owning the final call

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
• 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, 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

What drives you

• You can go deep on the hard problems you've 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 hold strong opinions on system design loosely, and change your mind when the evidence does
• You thrive where 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 screen (15 to 20 min): Fit, motivation, and a quick check for real, specific experience on cross-functional work, uplifting others, technical debt ownership, staying current, and hiring influence.
• R1, Technical: debugging & correctness (60 min): A small billing-shaped code sample with seeded defects. You walk through it, find what's wrong, including the one nobody would notice for a quarter, and fix the one that matters most, live.
• R2, Technical: design under ambiguity (60 min): A deliberately underspecified, Zenskar-shaped problem. You design it, defend your choices, and reason through a real, resolved Zenskar architecture decision.
• R3, Project deep-dive & (60 min): A deep dive into one real project you led, the problem, the non-engineering friction, how you knew it was healthy, and how it shipped.
• R4, Founder / Managerial (60 min): Whether someone is measurably better because of you, whether you've reversed a bad call made above you, whether you've held a hiring bar without owning the decision, and overall fit.
• Reference checks: Two former direct managers, contacted by the hiring manager, including who on your team got better because of you and how they'd know.