Practo - Staff Backend/AI Engineer

Practo; Bengaluru; On-site; INR 1,800,000 - 2,500,000; Full time

Job summary

Practo is seeking a Staff Backend/AI Engineer in Bengaluru to design and implement a scalable AI platform. The ideal candidate will have 8+ years of backend engineering experience, expertise with microservices architectures, and a deep understanding of AI technologies.

This role demands a dedicated individual contributor who excels in high-ambiguity environments and can integrate cutting-edge AI technologies to enhance healthcare applications.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience in backend development and system architecture.
• Deep expertise in complex backend infrastructure.
• Experience with AI technologies and vector databases.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement the architecture of core AI platform.
• Evaluate and integrate latest AI technologies.
• Define AI-first software engineering standards.

Skills

Backend engineering

Microservices architectures

Kubernetes

Kafka

gRPC

AI tools (Claude Code, GitHub Copilot)

Job description

Job Role/Title : Staff Backend/AI Engineer

Experience Range : 8-10 years

Location : Bangalore

About Practo & The AI Team

At Practo, our mission is to make quality healthcare accessible to over a billion people. We connect millions of patients with thousands of doctors, clinics, and hospitals, generating a massive scale of healthcare interactions.

We are building the intelligence engine that will power the next generation of product experiences for healthcare consumers and providers. This isnt about just wrapping a few APIs; its about architecting a highly scalable, secure, and high-performance AI platform from the ground up that deals with complex medical data, physician workflows, and patient care journeys.

The Impact You Will Have

• Build from Blank Canvas to Scale: Design and implement the end-to-end architecture of our core AI platform, ensuring it handles the complexity, security, and scale required by modern healthcare applications.
• Own the Technical Horizon: Evaluate and integrate the latest open-source and proprietary AI technologies (vector databases, orchestration frameworks, model serving) to keep our stack at the absolute cutting edge.
• Set the Engineering Standard: Define what AI-first software engineering looks like for the rest of the organization through your architectural decisions and high-velocity output.

The DNA We Are Looking For

• Battle-Tested Backend Expertise (~8+ Years): You are, first and foremost, a hardcore software engineer. You have spent years building, scaling, and maintaining complex backend systems.
• You have deep expertise in core backend infrastructure, including microservices architectures, Kubernetes, Kafka, gRPC, etc.
• You know what architectural decisions cause bottlenecks at scale, how to design robust APIs, and how to build systems that don't break under heavy load.
• A Pure Builder (100% IC): You are a dedicated, high-impact Individual Contributor. Your leverage comes from your technical architecture, system scalability, and raw code output.
• The AI-Augmented Developer: You build with AI. You are fluent in the new paradigm of software engineering, aggressively leveraging tools like Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, and Cursor as massive force multipliers.
• Deeply Plugged into the AI Ecosystem: You understand agentic AI architectures, AI agents orchestration frameworks (e.g., LangGraph, AutoGen, CrewAI), vector databases (e.g., Pinecone, Milvus), LLM orchestration frameworks, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines, and model serving infrastructure (e.g., vLLM).
• High Agency & Extreme Resourcefulness: You operate with a growth mindset and thrive in high-ambiguity, fast-paced environments. You dont wait for perfectly scoped requirements. You figure it out, you hustle, and you ship relentlessly.

A Note On Profile

This is a heavy engineering and infrastructure role. While AI is at the core of what we are building to revolutionize healthcare, we are looking for candidates with a rigorous backend software engineering foundation rather than pure ML researchers or data scientists who focus primarily on model training.

(ref:hirist.tech)