SDE-3 — Backend Engineer

nLocation: Mumbai (preferred) / Remote, India

nEmployment Type: Full-time

nExperience: 6–10 Years

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nAbout the Role

nWe 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 modern backend design.

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nKey Responsibilities

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- Design and own backend systems and services that are scalable, secure, and highly available
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- Lead technical architecture decisions — service decomposition, data modelling, API design, and system reliability
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- Build and operate AI-native backend infrastructure — LLM orchestration layers, agentic pipelines, RAG systems, tool-use frameworks, and evaluation loops
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- Define and enforce backend engineering standards, code quality practices, and security patterns
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- Collaborate with product, frontend, and data teams to deliver complex, cross-functional features
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- Own performance at scale — query optimisation, caching strategies, infrastructure bottlenecks
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- Drive incident response, root cause analysis, and reliability improvements
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- Mentor SDE-1 and SDE-2 engineers, grow technical depth across the team
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nMust-Have Skills

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- Expert-level Node.js backend development — services, APIs, event-driven architecture
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- TypeScript — robust typing across backend services and shared libraries
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- Deep experience with MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Redis — schema design,



query optimisation, indexing, caching
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- REST APIs and microservices architecture — design patterns, versioning, contract testing
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- Solid understanding of system design — distributed systems, consistency, fault tolerance, scalability
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- Experience with message queues and async processing (Kafka, RabbitMQ, BullMQ or equivalent)
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- CI/CD pipelines, containerisation (Docker/Kubernetes), and production deployment practices
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- Strong testing discipline — unit, integration, contract, and load testing
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- AI-native thinking — fluency with LLMs, prompt engineering, and agentic system design
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nStrongly Preferred

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- Hands-on experience building and operating agentic AI systems in production — orchestration (LangChain, LangGraph, CrewAI or equivalent), tool use, memory, and evaluation frameworks
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- Experience with RAG pipelines — vector databases (Pinecone, Weaviate, pgvector), embedding models, chunking and retrieval strategies
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- Multi-model LLM integration — OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, open-source models — with guardrails and fallback patterns
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- Exposure to data platform engineering or ML infrastructure is a plus
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nWhat Success Looks Like

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- You independently lead and deliver complex backend systems end to end
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- Your architecture decisions hold up at scale — performance, reliability, and maintainability
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- You are the go-to person for production issues, system design reviews, and backend standards
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- You are a multiplier for the team — engineers around you get better because of you
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- You bring AI into the backend not as an integration, but as a design instinct — agentic patterns, LLM tooling, and intelligent automation are part of how you think
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📌 SDE 3 (Backend) (Mumbai)
🏢 Pepper
📍 Mumbai