Senior Backend Engineer

About Us

At Vahan, we are building Indias first AI-powered recruitment marketplace for the countrys 300 million-strong blue-collar workforce, opening doors to economic opportunities and brighter futures.

Already Indias largest recruitment platform, Vahan is backed by marquee investors like Khosla Ventures, Y Combinator, LemmaTree (a Temasek-founded investing firm), Persol Group, Bharti Airtel, Vijay Shekhar Sharma (CEO, Paytm), and senior executives from Google and Facebook.

Our customers include leading names such as Swiggy, Zomato, Rapido, Zepto, and many more. We leverage cutting-edge technology and AI to help these companies recruit at scale and with precision.

Our vision is ambitious: to become the go-to platform for blue-collar professionals worldwide, empowering them with not just earning opportunities but also the tools, benefits, and support they need to thrive. Our mission is to impact over a billion lives globally, creating a future where everyone has access to economic prosperity.

If our vision excites you, Vahan might just be your next adventure. Were on the hunt for driven individuals who love tackling big challenges. If this sounds like your kind of journey, dive into the details and see where you can make your mark.

This is a senior individual contributor role with technical leadership responsibility. You will remain hands-on while owning the technical direction, quality, and outcomes of critical backend systems.

You will act as a go-to engineer for backend design decisions, scalability challenges, and code quality, influencing teams through technical leadership rather than people management.

What You Will Be Doing

Own and Lead Backend Systems

• Own the design, evolution, and reliability of high-impact backend systems and services.
• Take responsibility for system health, scalability, performance, and maintainability.
• Lead technical initiatives that address existing scale issues, tech debt, and architectural gaps.

System Design & Architecture

• Drive both high-level and low-level system design with a focus on correctness, scalability, and long-term evolution.
• Design data models, APIs, async workflows, and service boundaries with clear ownership.
• Make pragmatic trade-offs that balance speed of delivery with system health.

Improve Code Quality & Maintainability

• Raise the bar on backend code quality through design reviews, code reviews, and hands-on refactoring.
• Simplify complex or brittle code paths and establish maintainable patterns.
• Introduce guardrails and best practices to prevent recurring quality issues.

Database & Performance Optimization

• Diagnose and resolve database bottlenecks, especially in PostgreSQL.
• Optimize schemas, queries, indexes, and data access patterns.
• Make informed decisions around caching, async processing (RabbitMQ or similar), and designing, operating, and evolving both real-time and batch analytics pipelines (ClickHouse or equivalent systems).

Technical Leadership & Mentorship

• Act as a trusted technical advisor for backend engineers across teams.
• Guide engineers on design choices, debugging strategies, and system thinking.
• Influence technical direction through reasoning, clarity, and example.

Production Ownership

• Take ownership of production issues, incident resolution, and post-incident learning.
• Improve observability, debuggability, and operational readiness of systems.
• Drive long-term reduction in incidents and operational load.

You Will Thrive in This Role If You

Core Requirements

• Have 8+ years of backend engineering experience, with strong expertise in Node.js.
• Have deep experience with relational databases, especially PostgreSQL, including performance tuning.
• Have designed and operated distributed backend systems in production.
• Are comfortable owning systems end to end, from design to production support.

Strong Plus

• Experience working with RabbitMQ or similar messaging systems.
• Hands-on exposure to ClickHouse or large-scale analytics systems.
• Experience deploying and operating systems on AWS.
• Strong understanding of debugging, observability, and production reliability.

Engineering Mindset

• You enjoy fixing messy systems and improving existing codebases incrementally.
• You value clear abstractions, readable code, and pragmatic design over over-engineering.
• You have a testing mindset and understand where tests add the most value.
• You think in terms of systems, trade-offs, and long-term impact, not just features.

Leadership Without Authority

• You influence technical decisions through clarity and reasoning.
• You are comfortable pushing back on timelines or scope when system health is at risk.
• You mentor other engineers and elevate overall engineering standards.

What We Offer

• Unlimited PTO: Trust and flexibility to manage your time in the way that works best for you.
• Comprehensive Medical Insurance: Plans designed to support you and your loved ones.
• Monthly Wellness Leaves: Regular time off to recharge and focus on what matters most.
• Competitive Pay: Your contributions are recognized and rewarded with a compensation package that reflects your impact.

Join us, and be part of something bigger - where your work drives real, positive change in the world.