FDE - Staff Software Engineer

Newpage Solutions; Chennai District; On-site; INR 3,500,000 - 6,000,000; Full time

Job summary

Newpage Solutions in Chennai is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to design and build scalable full‑stack AI-powered systems. You will collaborate with Commercial, Manufacturing, and R&D to turn complex business challenges into reliable, production‑ready software.

You will mentor engineers, lead technical initiatives, and shape architecture while delivering fast, high‑quality solutions across the stack with a focus on RAG and AI‑powered workflows.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, software engineering, or related field with 7+ years of experience.
• Deep production experience with Python and JavaScript/TypeScript across backend and frontend.
• Strong frontend framework experience (Next.js/React) and backend API development.
• Cloud platforms experience (AWS preferred; Azure/GCP valued) with infrastructure-as-code tooling.

Responsibilities

• Architect end-to-end multi-component systems and mentor engineers on architecture.
• Lead rapid delivery initiatives and prototype-first approaches across teams.
• Define RAG standards, implement retrieval-augmented solutions, and supervise AI pipelines.
• Influence senior stakeholders, manage complex landscapes, and ensure delivery quality.
• Foster psychological safety, developer experience, and effective cross-team communication.
• Drive lean practices, reliability, and post-incident improvements across platforms.

Skills

Architecture & Design

Code Quality & Review

Full-Stack Development

Problem Discovery

Rapid Prototyping

Retrieval Augmentation

AI-Augmented Development

Multi-Audience Communication

Business Immersion

Stakeholder Management

Team Collaboration

Education

Bachelor's degree in computer science or software engineering

Tools

GitHub Actions

CI/CD tooling

Containerisation & IaC

Job description

About Newpage Solutions: Newpage Solutions is a global digital health innovation company helping people live longer, healthier lives. We partner with life sciences organizations—pharmaceutical, biotech and healthcare leaders—to build transformative AI and data‑driven technologies addressing real‑world health challenges.

Staff Software Engineer – FDE

Location: Chennai | Type: Full‑time

From strategy and research to UX design and agile development, we deliver and validate impactful solutions using lean, human‑centered practices. We are a Great Place to Work certified company for the last three consecutive years, hold a top Glassdoor rating and are named among the "Top 50 Most Promising Healthcare Solution Providers" by CIOReview. We foster creativity, continuous learning and inclusivity, creating an environment where bold ideas thrive and make a measurable difference in people's lives.

Your Mission

We are looking for a Staff Software Engineer who will design and build scalable full‑stack software systems that deliver measurable business value. You will work directly with teams across Commercial, Manufacturing, and R&D to discover problems, navigate ambiguity, and ship practical solutions quickly. You will develop AI‑powered applications, including production RAG systems, LLM integrations, and optimized retrieval pipelines, identify repeatable patterns in your work and collaborate with platform teams to generalize solutions into reusable frameworks. You will lead technical initiatives, mentor engineers, and turn complex business challenges into reliable, production‑ready systems.

Responsibilities

• Business: Immerse in operations until you think like an insider, rapidly acquire domain expertise through direct observation, translate between business and engineering seamlessly, and mentor engineers in your area on immersion. Influence senior stakeholders effectively, manage complex stakeholder landscapes with competing agendas, and build trust rapidly with new stakeholders.
• Delivery: Lead rapid delivery initiatives across teams, coach on prototype‑first approaches, and establish trust through consistent fast delivery. Build complete applications rapidly across any technology stack, select the right tools for each problem, and define clear criteria for prototype‑to‑production transitions.
• Generative AI: Architect RAG systems for complex use cases across teams, implement advanced techniques such as hybrid search, reranking, query expansion, mentor engineers on RAG best practices, and establish RAG standards. Lead evaluation strategy across teams, establishing annotation guidelines, training human‑calibrated LLM judges, and building evaluation pipelines that connect tracing to datasets to experiments.
• People: Build high‑performing teams across your area, navigate complex interpersonal dynamics, foster psychological safety, and create environments where diverse perspectives are valued. Influence through communication at all levels from frontline to executive, handle difficult conversations skillfully, and train engineers in your area on effective communication.
• AI‑Augmented Development: Optimize AI tool usage across teams, train engineers on AI‑augmented and agentic engineering workflows, evaluate new AI development tools, and establish practices that balance AI speed with verification rigor.
• Scale: Design complex multi‑component systems end‑to‑end, evaluate architectural options for large initiatives, guide technical decisions, and mentor engineers on architecture. Create debt‑reduction strategies, influence roadmap decisions to include debt work, and teach engineers when to accept debt for speed versus when to invest in quality.
• Documentation: Define documentation standards, create documentation systems and templates, train engineers on spec‑driven development, and ensure documentation quality. Lead pattern generalization initiatives, defining criteria for when to generalize versus keep custom.
• Reliability: Define reliability standards, drive post‑incident improvements systematically, design capacity‑planning processes, and mentor engineers on SRE practices.
• Process: Lead lean transformations, design flow‑optimised processes, coach engineers on lean principles, balance speed with sustainability, and establish metrics that drive improvement.

Role Behaviours

• Own the Outcome: Drive accountability culture focused on outcomes, own business relationships and impact metrics, make trade‑offs between custom solutions and generalisable work, and ensure verification rigor for AI‑generated code.
• Be Polymath Oriented: Champion cross‑disciplinary learning, create holistic solutions spanning technical and business domains, embody the Renaissance Engineer ideal, translate specialised knowledge into accessible explanations, and think like a business insider.
• Communicate with Precision: Create spec‑driven development practices, mentor others on precise communication, span C‑level executives to frontline workers, drive clarity as a core value, and represent the organisation externally.
• Don’t Lose Your Curiosity: Drive team curiosity through challenging questions, create environments where exploration and experimentation are encouraged, model problem discovery orientation, and seek out ambiguity.
• Think in Systems: Shape systems design practices, conduct chaos engineering experiments, influence cross‑team architecture decisions, create clarity from complexity, and bridge technical systems with business processes.

Practitioner‑level Skills

• Architecture & Design: Design complex multi‑component systems end‑to‑end, evaluate architectural options, guide technical decisions, and mentor engineers on architecture, balancing elegance with delivery needs.
• Code Quality & Review: Establish and enforce quality standards, mentor engineers on effective code review, ensure verification depth for AI‑assisted development, and drive testing strategies.
• Full‑Stack Development: Build complete applications rapidly across any technology stack, select the right tools for each problem, balance technical debt with delivery speed, and mentor engineers on full‑stack development.
• Problem Discovery: Seek undefined problems, embed with users to discover latent needs, coach engineers on problem discovery techniques, and turn ambiguity into clear problem statements.
• Rapid Prototyping & Validation: Lead rapid delivery initiatives, coach prototype‑first approaches, establish trust through consistent fast delivery, and define clear criteria for prototype‑to‑production transitions.
• Retrieval Augmentation: Architect RAG systems, implement advanced techniques, mentor engineers on RAG best practices, and establish RAG standards.
• AI‑Augmented Development: Optimize AI tool usage, train engineers on AI‑augmented workflows, evaluate new tools, and establish practices balancing speed with verification rigor.
• Multi‑Audience Communication: Influence through communication at all levels, handle difficult conversations skillfully, train engineers in effective communication, and represent teams across the function.
• Business Immersion: Immerse in operations, acquire domain expertise, translate between business and engineering, and mentor engineers on immersion.
• Stakeholder Management: Influence senior stakeholders, manage complex stakeholder landscapes, build trust rapidly, and shield teams from organisational friction.
• Team Collaboration: Build high‑performing teams, navigate interpersonal dynamics, foster psychological safety, and create environments where diverse perspectives are valued and heard.

Working‑level Skills

• DevOps & CI/CD: Build complete CI/CD pipelines, manage infrastructure as code, implement monitoring, and design deployment strategies for services.
• Cloud Platforms: Design cloud‑native solutions, manage infrastructure as code, implement security best practices, make informed service selections, and troubleshoot cloud‑specific issues.
• AI Evaluation & Observability: Design evaluation frameworks, build golden datasets, establish annotation workflows, run experiments to compare prompts and model changes.
• Technical Debt Management: Prioritise debt systematically, balance debt reduction with feature work, and know when to take on debt intentionally.
• Data Integration: Integrate multiple data sources, clean messy datasets, handle inconsistent formats, document data lineage, and troubleshoot integration failures.
• Site Reliability Engineering: Design observability strategies, lead incident response, implement resilience testing, conduct blameless post‑mortems, and balance reliability investment with feature velocity.
• Service Management: Design service offerings with clear value propositions, manage SLAs, improve service delivery based on user feedback, and communicate service status proactively.

Foundational‑level Skills

• AI Literacy: Evaluate AI solutions critically, understand bias, fairness and hallucination risks, and make informed decisions about when AI helps versus traditional approaches.
• Data Modelling: Create efficient data models balancing normalisation with query performance, optimise queries, handle schema migrations, and choose appropriate storage technologies.
• Technical Writing: Create comprehensive documentation, write precise specifications that enable accurate AI‑generated code, establish documentation practices, and ensure docs are discoverable.
• Pattern Generalization: Extract reusable components, design appropriate abstractions balancing flexibility and simplicity, and collaborate with FDEs to validate generalised solutions.
• Knowledge Management: Create searchable knowledge articles, maintain team documentation, and organise information proactively.
• Developer Experience: Document developer pain points, write getting‑started guides, and contribute to improving existing golden paths based on user feedback.

What You Bring

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, software engineering, or a related field with 7+ years of relevant professional experience.
• Deep production experience with Python and JavaScript/TypeScript across backend and frontend, with demonstrated ability to work comfortably across the full stack.
• Strong experience with modern frontend frameworks (e.g., Next.js or React) and backend API development.
• Extensive experience with cloud platforms (AWS preferred; Azure or GCP also valued), including infrastructure‑as‑code tools (e.g., CloudFormation or Terraform).
• Deep working knowledge of multiple database paradigms, including relational databases (e.g., PostgreSQL), document databases, and key‑value stores (e.g., Redis), with the ability to select the right storage technology for each problem.
• Strong experience with CI/CD pipelines (e.g., GitHub Actions), containerisation, and production deployment strategies.
• Demonstrable fluency with AI coding tools (e.g., Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot) and proven ability to design agentic engineering workflows and train teams on AI‑augmented development practices.
• Hands‑on experience architecting production generative AI applications (LLM integrations, vector databases, RAG systems, evaluation pipelines) is essential.
• Experience leading technical initiatives across multiple teams, mentoring engineers, and establishing engineering practices is required.
• Experience navigating ambiguous problem spaces, working directly with business stakeholders and end users, and shipping working solutions rapidly is required.
• Experience in an embedded, forward‑deployed, or consulting‑style engineering model is a strong plus.

Additional Notes

• Must have exceptional communication skills and the ability to influence senior levels. This role requires comfort leading across ambiguous environments, building trust‑based relationships with commercial stakeholders at all levels, developing junior and mid‑level engineers, and making strategic decisions that balance delivery speed with architectural integrity.

What We Offer

• A people‑first culture – supportive peers, open communication and a strong sense of belonging.
• Smart, purposeful collaboration – work with talented colleagues to create technologies that solve meaningful business challenges.
• Balance that lasts – we respect your time and support a healthy integration of work and life.
• Room to grow – opportunities for learning, leadership and career development, shaped around you.
• Meaningful rewards – competitive compensation that recognises both contribution and potential.

Ready to Apply?

Let us build the future of health together. Email: [e-mail]