SDE-3

About the role

We’re looking for a senior, hands-on engineer who can own meaningful product and technical problems from the first unclear conversation to a healthy production rollout.

This is primary a backend role. This is not a role where seniority means moving away from code.

You will not have direct reports by default. Your leverage comes from sound decisions, clear execution, strong reviews, and making it easier for other engineers to contribute.

Billing experience is not required. A healthy respect for correctness is.

What you'll walk into

Our backend is primarily Python and Postgres on AWS, running a multi-tenant platform. Prior experience with this exact stack is useful, but not required.

The software moves money and sits between customers’ CRM and ERP systems. The interesting failures are often not loud exceptions—they are retries, duplicate actions, partial state, unclear audit trails, slow workflows, and an edge case that quietly creates the wrong invoice.

At the same time, finance teams should not need to understand our architecture to use the product. SDE3 engineers help make complex rules feel simple without hiding operational risk.

Projects you might work on

The exact project depends on product priorities, but SDE3-sized work could include:

• Building multi dimensional pricing model in core billing engine to help support our clients’ complex billing needs
• Scale our clickhouse server to handle 5x data growth we foresee over the next year.
• Make our CRM/ERP integrations reliable by ensuring retries, idempotency, status visibility, recovery, and customer-facing failure states are present.
• Build AI Agent to help parse contract PDFs reliably

Your first 30 days

The first month is about building context quickly while remaining useful. By the end of 30 days, we expect you to have:

• Learned the core journey from customer contracts and usage data to invoices and revenue workflows.
• Shipped several safe changes, including at least one production bug fix.
• Participated in a real production investigation and understood the relevant logs, metrics, and operational tools.
• Reviewed code and established working relationships with product, design, solutions, and engineering peers.
• Identified one medium-sized problem to own and written or contributed to a clear technical plan.
• Asked enough questions to expose assumptions rather than quietly building the wrong thing.

By 90 days

By the end of 90 days, you should be operating as the clear owner of a meaningful project or milestone. That means you can:

• Turn an ambiguous goal into an agreed scope, design, delivery plan, and set of explicit risks.
• Make and defend decisions across APIs, data, failure modes, reliability, and operability.
• Break work down so one or more engineers can contribute effectively.
• Plan migration, backward compatibility, rollout, monitoring, and recovery—not bolt them on after implementation.
• Ship a meaningful milestone and verify its correctness and product outcome in production.
• Own at least one difficult production investigation through diagnosis, mitigation, and follow-up.
• Provide useful code and design reviews that improve both the implementation and the engineer.
• Explain what should happen next: remaining risks, technical debt, product gaps, and the next sensible investment.

A strong 90-day outcome is not “completed every ticket.” It is “created clarity, shipped something meaningful, and left the system and team easier to operate.”

Who you are

• You have roughly 5–7 years of professional software-development experience; scope and evidence matter more than an exact year count.
• You have personally shipped and operated production systems used by real customers.
• You remain comfortable coding, debugging, reviewing changes, and reading unfamiliar systems.
• You have deep backend experience and can work across APIs, data, asynchronous processing, infrastructure, and production operations.
• You have owned at least one substantial project through production and can explain your personal decisions and outcomes.
• You work effectively with product, design, customer-facing teams, and engineers with different levels of experience.
• You have helped other engineers become more effective through reviews, pairing, planning, or mentorship.

Good to have

None of these are mandatory:

• Python, Postgres, AWS, or distributed-systems experience.
• AWS, Docker, CI/CD, background jobs, or event-driven systems.
• Experience with multi-tenant B2B software and external integrations.
• Hands-on observability using logs, traces, metrics, and production profiling.
• Billing, payments, accounting, fintech, or revenue-automation exposure.
• Experience using AI coding tools without outsourcing judgment or understanding.

Location

• Hybrid - 3 days per week
• Office Location: Indiranagar, Bengaluru.
• Address: 3rd Floor, A wing No 1, Carlton Towers, HAL Old Airport Rd, HAL 2nd Stage, Indiranagar, Bengaluru, Karnataka 560008.

Interview process

Our process is practical and evidence-based. The live technical rounds are capped at 60 minutes; the project/HM conversation is 90 minutes with a short reset.

• R0, Introductory conversation: A 15–20 minute conversation about role alignment, current scope, hands-on engineering, location, compensation, and motivation.
• R1, Debugging and correctness: A 60-minute practical exercise in Python, Java, or Go using a small existing codebase and supplied tests. The goal is to diagnose and safely correct consequential problems—not solve an algorithm puzzle.
• R2, Technical design: A 60-minute deliberately underspecified, Zenskar-shaped design problem. You will clarify it, design an implementable solution, discuss failure and evolution, and drill into one component.
• R3, Project and Hiring Manager deep dive: A 75-minute conversation with the Hiring Manager: one substantial project in depth, followed by collaboration, feedback, mistakes, mentoring, motivation, and the environment in which you do your best work. No presentation is required.
• R4, Engineering Leadership: A final 30 -minute conversation with our Head of Engineering or CTO about engineering judgment, product and business trade-offs, your growth trajectory, and Zenskar’s direction. It is assessed, but there is no additional coding or system-design exercise.

During technical rounds, documentation and syntax search are allowed. AI can help only with syntax or an isolated generic utility; it cannot solve, debug, or design the interview problem for you.

How to Apply

Interested? Click here to apply → https://evolve.keka.com/careers/applyjob/92122