Software Development EngineerII (SDE2)

Placed.

India

On-site

INR 800,000 - 1,200,000

Full time

14 days+

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Job summary

A leading company is seeking an SDE2 who will own significant product surfaces and mentor others. This role emphasizes reliability, scalability, and customer value while driving continuous improvement and operational excellence in software delivery.

Qualifications

Mid-level individual contributor owning medium-sized services.
Mentors early-career engineers and drives high-quality software delivery.

Responsibilities

Authors design documents and writes well-tested code.
Embeds monitoring, alerting, and automated remediation.
Partners closely with product, design, data, infrastructure, and QA.

Skills

design for scale

security by design

reliability engineering

continuous improvement

end-to-end ownership

scalability

continuous codebase improvement

effective communication

operational excellence

mentorship

cross-functional collaboration

Job description

This range is provided by Placed.. Your actual pay will be based on your skills and experience — talk with your recruiter to learn more.

Base pay range

An SDE2 is a mid‑level individual contributor who owns medium‑sized services or product surfaces, guides engineering standards, and mentors early‑career engineers. They drive end‑to‑end delivery of high‑quality software that measurably improves customer or business outcomes. While largely autonomous, they collaborate across functions and raise the engineering bar through sound design, operational excellence, and continuous improvement.

Core Responsibilities

End‑to‑end ownership – authors design documents, writes well‑tested code, deploys, operates, and maintains production components. Dashboards, runbooks, and on‑call pages remain up to date so anyone can operate the system.

Design for scale and reliability – selects appropriate architectural patterns, anticipates failure modes, and balances near‑term delivery with long‑term maintainability. Architectural‑decision records, capacity plans, and thorough post‑mortems are routine outputs.

Predictable delivery – breaks projects into realistic milestones, sizes tasks accurately, surfaces risk early, and consistently meets committed dates. Sprint boards and release notes show minimal slippage.

Operational excellence – embeds monitoring, alerting, and automated remediation; participates in on‑call rotations; and works relentlessly to reduce mean‑time‑to‑recover when incidents occur. Post‑incident action items are driven to closure until service‑level objectives are green again.

Continuous codebase improvement – refactors for readability, expands test coverage, enforces style guides, and pays down technical debt rather than passing it forward. Code reviews raise quality for everyone.

Mentorship and unblockage – pairs with junior engineers, reviews designs, explains trade‑offs, and provides clear, actionable feedback. Success is measured by the growing autonomy and confidence of mentees.

Cross‑functional collaboration – partners closely with product, design, data, infrastructure, and QA to ensure real customer problems are solved. Alignment is maintained through written updates, demos, and regular checkpoints.

Crisp communication – tailors depth and vocabulary to audiences ranging from executives to new‑hire engineers, both in writing and verbally. Incident updates, RFCs, and demos leave no ambiguity.

Security, privacy, and compliance by design – builds threat models, integrates static and dynamic scanning, and closes compliance tasks during development instead of retrofitting. Zero avoidable high‑severity vulnerabilities are introduced.

Learning and continuous improvement – experiments with new practices or tooling, shares lessons learned, and drives measurable team‑level process improvements. Brown‑bag sessions and data‑backed proposals regularly translate into adopted changes.

Global KPI Framework

Code quality & maintainability – readable, modular, well‑tested code; post‑release defect rate below roughly 0.2 perKLOC each quarter; examples include instituting linting or a refactor that prevented future outages.
System design & scalability – solutions comfortably handle forecasted two‑year growth with documented trade‑offs; unplanned scalability incidents are rare; design‑doc walkthroughs compare multiple options.
Delivery predictability – estimates accurate within ±10percent at least 70percent of the time; slip ratio small and trending down; risks surfaced early.
Operational excellence & reliability – services meet SLOs, recover quickly, and generate little on‑call toil; stories often involve automated rollbacks or tuned alerts that halved incident resolution time.
Business & customer impact – engineering output translates to measurable adoption, latency reduction, retention uplift, or revenue gains; technical decisions are framed in terms of customer pain solved.
Collaboration & influence – builds trust and resolves conflicts constructively across functions or teams; at least one cross‑team feature is delivered each half and peer feedback averages 4.5/5 or better.
Mentorship & knowledge sharing – develops early‑career engineers through structured guidance and spreads best practices via documentation and talks; mentees gain autonomy and confidence.
Continuous improvement & innovation – proactively improves tooling, processes, or architecture; closes two or more tech‑debt items each quarter and sees at least one proof‑of‑concept reach production every six months.
Security & compliance – zero preventable security incidents; rapid response to critical CVEs; often leads threat‑model workshops or integrates secret scanning into CI pipelines.
Documentation & knowledge management – key flows and decisions remain discoverable and current, lowering cognitive load for everyone; runbooks and ADRs updated with every major release.

Summary

An SDE2 is a self‑directed engineer who owns significant product surfaces, mentors others, and sets a high bar for reliability, scalability, and customer value. Their impact is visible both in the robust systems they steward and in the rising effectiveness of the engineers around them.

Skills: design for scale,security by design,reliability engineering,continuous improvement,end-to-end ownership,scalability,continuous codebase improvement,engineers,effective communication,reliability,operational excellence,code,mentorship,cross-functional collaboration

Seniority level