Senior Software Engineer (7+ yrs) — Utsav | Bengaluru

Utsav App; Bengaluru; On-site; INR 6,000,000 - 9,000,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary plus ESOPs

A live product with real users, real收入

A direct line to the Founder & CTO —no

The chance to define engineering

Job summary

Utsav in Bengaluru invites a senior engineering lead to join as a founding-team member. You will own end-to-end development across the stack—from backend services to mobile apps and infrastructure—and drive scalable deployments on GKE, AWS Lambda, and multiple payment gateways.

The role requires 7–9+ years building production systems, mentoring a small team, and shaping technical strategy with the Founder & CTO.

Qualifications

• 7–9+ years building and operating production systems at scale.
• Strong fundamentals in system design, databases, and cloud infra.
• Player-coach leadership with hands-on delivery.
• Curious, research-oriented, high-energy, and collaborative.

Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end design, build, deployment, and operations across the stack.
• Raise the bar for a small, high-leverage team and mentor others.
• Lead architecture discussions with the Founder & CTO.
• Evaluate new tech and prototype quickly for production.
• Ensure reliability and performance under peak loads (festivals/season).

Skills

Leadership

System design

Databases

Cloud infrastructure

Debugging under pressure

Research oriented

Team mentorship

Tools

Node.js/TypeScript

React Native

Next.js

PostgreSQL

GKE

AWS Lambda

SQS

Razorpay

PayU

PhonePe

Kubernetes

Job description

Utsav (utsavapp.in) is a venture-backed devotion-tech startup. Devotees across India book Hindu pujas, temple services and spiritual offerings through our app and website, in five Indian languages. We recently raised our Series A led by Atomic Capital, and we're now engineering the 5→100 chapter.

Our tech team is 4 people, including the Founder & CTO. You'd be the senior-most engineering hire — effectively a founding-team role. A player-coach: you build hands-on every day AND lead the team. No silos, no "not my area" — backend, mobile, infrastructure, data, integrations: all of it is yours.

Our stack and philosophy

Stack today: Node.js/TypeScript services, React Native (Expo) consumer app, Next.js admin panel, PostgreSQL, GKE on Google Cloud, AWS Lambda + SQS, and multi-gateway payments (Razorpay, PayU, PhonePe).

Philosophy: coding language is no longer a barrier — AI‑assisted development has made syntax cheap. What we hire for is vision, competence, imagination, and the discipline to research, learn and implement anything the product needs.

Responsibilities

• End-to-end ownership of design, build, deployment and operations across the stack
• Institutionise the experience of scale from your previous companies — reliability, observability, performance, engineering hygiene
• Lead, mentor and raise the bar for a small, high-leverage team
• Rapid research-to-production cycles: evaluate new tech, prototype fast, ship what works
• Partner with the Founder & CTO on architecture and technical strategy
• Own the systems that matter most — bookings under festival‑morning load, payments that must never lose a rupee, and an app that has to work on a ₹8,000 phone in a tier‑3 town

Qualifications

• 7–9+ years building and operating production systems, with genuine exposure to scale
• Strong fundamentals: system design, databases, cloud infrastructure, debugging under fire
• Player‑coach leadership: leads without ego, ships without hand‑holding
• Curious, research‑oriented, high-energy — genuinely fun to build with

Good to have

• Consumer‑scale product experience, especially with traffic that spikes on specific days
• Payment gateway or fintech‑grade correctness workReact Native, Kubernetes, or high‑concurrency PostgreSQL experience

Who should not apply

Narrow specialists unwilling to work outside one layer of the stack, or candidates optimising for brand‑name comfort and predictable scope. This is not a comfortable job — it's a founding‑team one.

What we offer

• Competitive salary plus ESOPs
• A live product with real users, real revenue and real scale problems
• A direct line to the Founder & CTO — no layers, no politics, no waiting for approvals
• The chance to define engineering culture at a company before it hardens