About the Role

Elkanio is hiring a Senior Python Developer to join an established engineering team working on a prestigious B2C travel experience booking platform. The product is live, has real users, and is scaling — we're expanding the team to accelerate the roadmap, strengthen delivery, and evolve the platform further.

You'll be plugging into an existing codebase and a working engineering team, contributing to new features, performance improvements, architectural enhancements, and platform evolution. This is a role for someone who's comfortable navigating mature systems, picking up context quickly, making sound technical decisions, and adding value from week one.

Beyond writing code, you'll be expected to take ownership of technical solutions, participate in system and architectural design, identify areas for improvement, and help the team build reliable, scalable, and maintainable software.

What You'll Do

- Build new features and enhance existing ones across the stack, with Python/Django as the primary backend technology.
- Work within an established production codebase: understand it carefully, respect existing patterns, and improve it thoughtfully.
- Design and extend scalable RESTful APIs powering booking flows, search, payments, user journeys, and other core platform capabilities.
- Translate business and product requirements into robust technical solutions, defining components, APIs, data flows, and integration approaches.
- Participate actively in system design and architectural decisions, considering scalability, performance, security, reliability, maintainability, and delivery timelines.
- Own technical solutions for assigned modules or business domains from requirement analysis and design through implementation, deployment, and production support.
- Review existing architecture and identify opportunities to simplify, modernize, and improve system reliability, scalability, and maintainability.
- Design solutions for high-volume search, booking, payment, and transaction workflows, with appropriate handling of concurrency, failures, retries, and data consistency.
- Design and optimize database models, queries, indexing strategies, caching approaches, and data-access patterns to support application performance and scale.
- Integrate and maintain third-party services including payment gateways, mapping services, communication platforms, and travel-domain APIs.
- Design resilient third-party integrations with appropriate timeout handling, retries, error handling, logging, monitoring, and failure recovery.
- Identify and address performance bottlenecks, technical debt, architectural limitations, and scalability concerns as the platform grows.
- Collaborate with the client's product, design, and engineering teams on planning, technical discussions, design reviews, and releases.
- Participate in code reviews and technical design reviews, ensuring quality, consistency, and adherence to engineering standards.




- Provide technical guidance and mentorship to other developers and contribute to improving team engineering practices.
- Debug and resolve production issues with ownership and urgency, while identifying and addressing underlying technical causes.
- Communicate technical approaches, trade-offs, risks, and recommendations clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

What We're Looking For
- 4–8 years of hands-on software development experience, with significant experience building production-grade backend applications.
- Robust backend expertise in Python, with solid hands-on experience in frameworks such as Django.
- Strong understanding of software architecture and system design, with the ability to design scalable backend solutions from business requirements.
- Proven experience designing and implementing RESTful APIs and backend services in production environments.
- Strong understanding of architectural and engineering principles such as SOLID, separation of concerns, modularity, design patterns, and clean, maintainable code.
- Ability to work effectively with and extend existing production codebases, rather than focusing only on greenfield development.
- Ability to make sound technical trade-offs across performance, scalability, reliability, security, maintainability, and delivery timelines.
- Strong understanding of authentication, authorization, API security, and general security best practices.
- Strong experience with relational databases, particularly PostgreSQL, including schema design, indexing, transactions, and query optimization.
- Working knowledge of NoSQL databases such as MongoDB and an understanding of when different data-storage approaches are appropriate.
- Experience with caching, background processing, asynchronous workflows, queues, or similar approaches used in scalable applications.
- Experience identifying application and system bottlenecks and implementing solutions to improve performance and scalability.
- Experience designing and working with third-party integrations and external APIs.
- Proficiency with Git and collaborative software development workflows.
- Familiarity with cloud platforms, particularly AWS, and containerization technologies such as Docker.
- Ability to understand technical requirements, create implementation approaches, and communicate technical designs and architectural decisions clearly.
- Strong problem-solving skills and the ability to work independently in a client-facing setup.
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
- Ability to mentor developers,



participate in technical discussions, and provide constructive guidance through design and code reviews.

Senior-Level Ownership As a Senior Developer, you'll be expected to go beyond implementation and take ownership of the technical direction of the areas you work on.
- Own technical solutions for assigned modules or business domains.
- Act as a technical point of contact for complex backend, integration, and production issues.
- Evaluate existing implementations and recommend pragmatic architectural improvements.
- Challenge requirements constructively and propose technically sound alternatives where appropriate.
- Balance ideal engineering solutions with practical business and delivery constraints.
- Identify architectural risks and technical debt early and help establish practical remediation plans.
- Mentor other developers on coding practices, design approaches, debugging, and engineering best practices.
- Contribute to defining and maintaining coding standards, design patterns, and engineering practices across the team.

Bonus Points
- Prior experience working on B2C platforms, especially in travel, hospitality, e-commerce, or other transaction-heavy domains.
- Experience contributing to mature, production-scale systems with real users and high availability requirements.
- Experience with payment gateways and third-party booking/inventory APIs.
- Experience with travel-domain APIs, flight/hotel booking platforms, GDS/NDC, OTA, or other travel technology integrations.
- Experience with distributed systems, event-driven architectures, message queues, or asynchronous processing.
- Experience with application monitoring, logging, observability, and production performance analysis.
- Experience creating architecture diagrams, technical design documents, API contracts, or solution designs.

What We Offer
- Compensation aligned with your experience and the industry standard — we don't underpay good people.
- The opportunity to work on a marquee B2C travel product with real users and real-world impact.
- A collaborative, low-ego engineering environment where ideas and technical discussions are encouraged.
- Direct exposure to client stakeholders, product teams, and technical decision-making.
- The opportunity to work on challenging problems involving scale, integrations, performance, payments, and travel technology.
- Room to grow technically, take ownership of larger areas, and contribute to the evolution of the platform.
- An environment where senior engineers can influence architecture, engineering practices, and product evolution, rather than simply implementing assigned tasks.

Pay: ₹50,000.00 - ₹100,000.00 per month

Benefits

- Flexible schedule

Ability to commute/relocate:
- Kochi, Kerala: Reliably commute or planning to relocate before starting work (Required)

Experience:
- Python: 4 years (Preferred)

Work Location: In person

📌 Senior Python Developer (Kochi)
🏢 ELKANIO RESEARCH LABS
📍 Kochi