Role & responsibilities

Technical ownership.

- Own the solution architecture end to end: the layered platform, its major components, & the interfaces between

them.

- Own the data model: relational system of record, time-series telemetry, topology graph as a projection of the

source of truth, & streaming event schemas. Define the contracts that hold the platform together.

- Own the platform framework: the internal service template every microservice inherits from, including

observability hooks, resilience patterns, contract testing, API versioning, & CI/CD scaffold.

- Own the per-service low-level designs, at a depth that engineering can pick up & implement against without

further translation.

- Own security, identity, & operational engineering framework across the platform.

Leadership & delivery.

- Lead the software engineering team: hire, mentor, performance-manage, & grow engineers across Senior, Mid, &

Junior levels.

- Own delivery cadence & quality: sprint planning with programme management, release gates, engineering

standards, technical debt management.

- Build a solid engineering culture: code review, test automation, continuous improvement.
- Partner cross-functionally with product, programme, adjacent engineering teams, & customer engineering when

required.

- Represent engineering with senior leadership: honest reporting, clear escalation, calm decision-making.
- Grow talent: create clear career paths & mentorship for every engineer on your team.

Preferred candidate profile

Technical depth, must have

- 12 or more years of hands-on software engineering experience, with at least 3 years in a principal-architect

capacity on systems of comparable complexity (multi-service, polyglot persistence, streaming data, real-time

graph).

- Strong data modelling skills.



You have personally designed relational schemas at the scale of tens of tables for a

transactional system, owned schema evolution, & have an opinion on referential integrity, normalisation,

partitioning, & indexing.

- Time-series data at scale (TimescaleDB, InfluxDB, Prometheus, ClickHouse, or equivalent). Retention tiering,

downsampling, query design.

- Graph databases for topology (Neo4j, JanusGraph, Neptune, or equivalent). Graph projection from a relational

source of truth.

- Stream processing at scale (Kafka & Flink, or equivalent). Topic design, partitioning, ordering guarantees, schema

evolution.

- Strong hands-on Python & Java. Comfortable reading & writing both in production. Modern async patterns.
- Cloud-native operation in production. Containers, Kubernetes, AWS or an equivalent major cloud. OpenTelemetry

for observability.

- API design, including REST, OpenAPI, & gRPC. Versioning & backward compatibility for consumers you do not

control.

- Low-level design skill. You can decompose a service into a build-ready design with sequence diagrams, failure

modes, capacity assumptions, & migration strategy.

- Awareness of AI & machine learning in production: model serving, feedback loops, drift monitoring.

Leadership depth, must have

- 4 or more years leading engineering teams as an Engineering Manager or equivalent. You have hired, developed, &

let go.

- Proven track record of shipping large software platforms end to end. Whole systems, not just features.
- Strong cross-functional partnership skills. You can sit in a room with product, programme, & customer engineers &

leave with a single aligned view.

- Clear communication in writing & in person, including with senior leadership.
- Calm under pressure. Sprints will slip. You will not solve that with heat.

📌 Software Engineering Manager (Gurugram)
🏢 Lightstorm Data Centers
📍 Gurugram