About the role

We' re looking for a Senior Staff Engineer to own the API platform and backend infrastructure that evolves toward a full PaaS offering.

This isn' t a greenfield role — we' re mid-transition, and the job is to lead the architecture, set the patterns, and bring the platform across without compromising reliability.

You'll own how the platform performs and scales across a multi-tenant environment operating at sub-second latency SLOs. You' ll be a trusted technical partner to platform engineering, product engineering, and security teams. We're also moving toward AI-native, spec-driven development — and we want this person to lead from the front on that shift.

What you ' ll do

Cloud architecture and platform strategy

- Own the evolution of our API platform, with NestJS as the primary backend framework.
- Design and maintain access control systems, authorization patterns, and ACL frameworks that work consistently across services.
- Define and enforce service-to-service interaction patterns, including authentication, trust boundaries, and inter-service contracts.
- Build and maintain shared backend libraries, frameworks, and abstractions that improve consistency and velocity across product engineering teams.
- Design and evolve event-driven architecture patterns — including async messaging, event sourcing, and queue-based workflows — across the platform.
- Partner with product and engineering to establish platform primitives that teams can build on reliably.

Performance and reliability

- Own performance and reliability for a multi-tenant platform operating at sub-second latency SLOs.




- Identify and resolve bottlenecks across the request path — from API gateway through to data layer.
- Define reliability standards, runbooks, and incident response patterns for platform-level failures.
- Instrument the platform for observability: traces, metrics, and alerts that surface problems before partners do.

Developer experience and DevOps

- Build and maintain tooling, automation, and CI/CD pipelines that improve reliability and shipping velocity.
- Establish best practices for infrastructure as code, containerisation, observability, and cost optimization.
- Embed security, compliance, and reliability standards into the development lifecycle by default.

Technical leadership

- Lead the architecture through a platform transition — setting direction, establishing patterns, and holding the bar on reliability throughout.
- Serve as a senior technical authority across the API platform, backend architecture, and cloud infrastructure.
- Own and evolve engineering guidelines across the org — coding standards, architectural patterns, review processes, and AI tooling norms.
- Champion AI-native and spec-driven development practices, setting the standard for how engineers work with AI tooling day-to-day.
- Align long-term technical direction with business objectives in partnership with Product, TPM, and Security leadership.

People leadership :





- Manage and mentor a small team of 3—4 platform engineers, providing technical guidance, career development, and day-to-day support.
- Set clear expectations, run structured reviews, and build a team culture of ownership and craft.
- Partner with engineering leadership on hiring, onboarding, and growing platform engineering talent.

What you bring

Required

- 12+ years in backend platform or cloud engineering roles.
- Deep expertise in NestJS and Node.js-based backend architectures at scale.
- Deep AWS expertise and strong understanding of distributed systems: microservices, containers, event-driven architectures.
- Strong experience designing access control systems, authorization frameworks, and IAM
- Hands-on experience building shared libraries and platform abstractions consumed by multiple product teams.
- Demonstrated track record of owning performance and reliability in multi- tenant SaaS environments with strict latency SLOs.
- Expertise with IaC (Terraform, CDK, or CloudFormation) and CI/CD pipelines.
- Strong networking, security, observability, and performance engineering fundamentals.
- Clear communication and the ability to influence across technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Preferred:
- Exposure to Azure, GCP, or other cloud environments.
- Experience in SaaS or PaaS at enterprise scale.
- Background in product engineering with a track record of shaping technical direction.
- Solid familiarity with AI-native development workflows and spec-driven development practices.
- Knowledge of AI agents, LLM integration patterns, and how they apply to platform and backend engineering.

📌 Senior Staff Engineer, Platform Engineering (Bengaluru)
🏢 Recroots
📍 Bengaluru