SDE-3 — Backend Engineer
Location: Mumbai (preferred) / Remote, India
Employment Type: Full-time
Experience: 6–10 Years
About the Role
We are looking for a Senior Backend Engineer (SDE-3) to own the design, scalability, and reliability of Pepper's backend systems. You will operate at the intersection of engineering depth and product thinking — leading architecture decisions, building AI-native backend infrastructure, and mentoring a growing engineering team. This role is for someone who thinks in systems, not just services, and who treats agentic AI patterns as a natural part of contemporary backend design.
Key Responsibilities
- Design and own backend systems and services that are scalable, secure, and highly available
- Lead technical architecture decisions — service decomposition, data modelling, API design, and system reliability
- Build and operate AI-native backend infrastructure — LLM orchestration layers, agentic pipelines, RAG systems, tool-use frameworks, and evaluation loops
- Define and enforce backend engineering standards, code quality practices,
and security patterns
- Collaborate with product, frontend, and data teams to deliver complex, cross-functional features
- Own performance at scale — query optimisation, caching strategies, infrastructure bottlenecks
- Drive incident response, root cause analysis, and reliability improvements
- Mentor SDE-1 and SDE-2 engineers, grow technical depth across the team
Must-Have Skills
- Expert-level Node.js backend development — services, APIs, event-driven architecture
- TypeScript — strong typing across backend services and shared libraries
- Deep experience with MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Redis — schema design, query optimisation, indexing, caching
- REST APIs and microservices architecture — design patterns, versioning, contract testing
- Solid understanding of system design — distributed systems, consistency, fault tolerance, scalability
- Experience with message queues and async processing (Kafka, RabbitMQ, BullMQ
📌 SDE 3 (Backend) (India)
🏢 Pepper
📍 India