Senior Backend Developer

Wits Innovation Lab; Mohali; On-site; INR 1,500,000 - 2,100,000; Full time

Job summary

Wits Innovation Lab in Mohali is seeking a Senior Backend Engineer to design scalable backend services, APIs, and data models for production workloads.

You will work across Docker/Kubernetes, cloud deployment, observability, and performance tuning to ensure reliability at high TPS, with collaboration across product and DevOps teams.

Qualifications

• 3–6 years of backend engineering experience.
• Strong fundamentals in system design and scalable architectures.
• Experience with REST APIs, databases, and cloud deployments.
• Familiarity with Kubernetes/EKS and Docker.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain scalable backend services and APIs.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to deploy production systems.
• Optimize database schemas and queries for high throughput.
• Implement observability and reliable deployment practices.

Skills

Backend fundamentals

System design

Scalability

Performance optimization

Memory management

Observability practices

Communication

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

AWS

Prometheus

Grafana

OpenTelemetry

Kafka

Terraform

Job description

Role: Senior Backend Engineer

Experience: 3-6 Years

Role Overview

• We are looking for a Senior Backend Engineer with strong fundamentals in backend engineering, system design, databases, scalability, and production-grade application architecture.
• The primary focus for this role is not limited to expertise in a specific programming language. The candidate may come from a background in Golang, Node.js, Java, Rust, Python, or any similar backend technology. What matters most is strong conceptual clarity, the ability to design scalable systems, and experience in building reliable backend services for real-world production workloads.
• The candidate should be comfortable working on high-throughput systems, database design, distributed services, deployment environments, and cross-cutting engineering concerns such as observability, memory management, performance optimisation, and cloud-native deployment.

Key Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain scalable backend services and APIs.
• Participate in system design discussions for new features, services, and platform components.
• Design efficient database schemas, indexes, and data access patterns based on application requirements.
• Optimise backend systems for high TPS, low latency, and reliable performance under load.
• Work on distributed system concerns such as retries, idempotency, rate limiting, caching, queues, and fault tolerance.
• Collaborate with frontend, DevOps, QA, and product teams to deliver production-ready solutions.
• Understand and contribute to deployment practices, especially around Kubernetes/EKS-based environments.
• Debug and resolve production issues related to performance, memory usage, database bottlenecks, and service reliability.
• Implement observability practices including structured logging, metrics, tracing, and alerting.
• Write clean, maintainable, and well-structured backend code in the chosen technology stack.

Required Skills

• Strong backend engineering fundamentals.
• Good understanding of system design concepts for scalable and reliable applications.
• Hands-on experience with at least one backend language such as Golang, Node.js, Java, Rust, Python, or similar.
• Strong understanding of REST APIs, service design, authentication, authorization, and API security.
• Good knowledge of database design, indexing, query optimisation, transactions, and data consistency.
• Experience with SQL databases such as PostgreSQL, MySQL, or similar.
• Understanding of NoSQL databases, caching systems, and when to use them.
• Experience working with Redis or similar caching technologies.
• Understanding of message queues, event-driven architecture, asynchronous processing, and background jobs.
• Ability to reason about memory management, garbage collection, concurrency, and runtime behaviour.
• Experience debugging performance issues in backend systems.
• Good understanding of high TPS systems, load testing, horizontal scaling, and bottleneck analysis.
• Familiarity with containerisation using Docker.
• Working understanding of Kubernetes-based deployments, preferably EKS.
• Understanding of CI/CD pipelines and cloud deployment practices.
• Good communication skills and ability to explain technical decisions clearly.

Good to Have Skills

• Experience with microservices architecture.
• Experience with AWS services, especially EKS, RDS, SQS, CloudWatch, ElastiCache, API Gateway, or Lambda.
• Understanding observability tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, Tempo, OpenTelemetry, or similar.
• Experience with distributed tracing and production monitoring.
• Experience with event streaming platforms such as Kafka.
• Knowledge of security best practices around JWT, OAuth2, RBAC, secrets management, and secure API design.
• Experience designing systems for high availability and fault tolerance.
• Exposure to infrastructure-as-code tools such as Terraform or CloudFormation.
• Experience mentoring junior engineers or reviewing technical designs.
• Expected System Design Knowledge
• The candidate should be comfortable discussing and designing systems involving:
• API Gateway and backend service architecture.
• Load balancing and horizontal scaling.
• Database schema design and query optimisation.
• Caching strategy and cache invalidation.
• Queues, retries, dead letter queues, and async workers.
• Rate limiting and throttling.
• Idempotency and duplicate request handling.
• Observability, logging, metrics, and tracing.
• Deployment architecture on Kubernetes/EKS.
• Memory optimization and runtime performance.
• Handling high TPS and peak traffic scenarios.
• Designing systems with reliability, maintainability, and scalability in mind.
• Candidate Evaluation Focus
• While coding ability is important, the main evaluation focus should be on:
• Backend concepts and fundamentals.
• System design clarity.
• Database design and optimisation.
• Ability to debug performance and scaling issues.
• Understanding of production deployment and cloud-native systems.
• Problem-solving approach.
• Ability to explain trade-offs clearly.
• Practical experience with real-world backend systems.
• Nodejs/ Golang/ Python/ Rust/ Java Typescript, Microservices, Docker, TPS , System Design & Distributed Systems
• Database Design & Query Optimization
• Kafka / Event-Driven Architecture