Software Engineer – Backend & Platform

Soket AI Labs; Hinoba-an; On-site; PHP 900,000 - 1,300,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive compensation

Equity participation opportunities

Flexible work arrangements

Parental and wellness leaves

Regular team offsites

Job summary

Soket AI Labs in Bengaluru is hiring a backend engineer to design, develop, and scale production-grade services powering AI workloads. You will build Rust-based systems, APIs, and cloud-native components, and collaborate with researchers to productionize AI capabilities across Docker/Kubernetes deployments.

We value 3–4 years of software engineering experience, strong Rust skills (2+ years in production), and the ability to own features end-to-end in a fast-moving startup environment.

Qualifications

• 3–4 years of professional software engineering experience, backend/platform/infrastructure.
• Rust production experience of at least 2 years.
• Experience building backend services, APIs, or distributed systems.
• Understanding REST APIs, service architecture, databases, caching, and asynchronous processing.
• Ability to own a feature from implementation through testing and deployment.
• Write clean, maintainable, well-tested code.
• Comfort working across backend, infrastructure, and developer tooling.

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and improve backend services powering Tensorstudio and Soket's enterprise AI services.
• Build scalable APIs and platform services for AI applications.
• Develop platform capabilities such as authentication, API management, usage metering, billing, payments, and account management.
• Build and maintain services and components in Rust (production experience required).
• Design, deploy, and maintain cloud-native services using Docker and Kubernetes.
• Work with AI researchers and product teams to productionize AI capabilities.
• Participate in debugging, performance optimization, monitoring, and reliability improvements.

Skills

Rust

Go

Python

Node.js

TypeScript

REST APIs

Distributed systems

PostgreSQL

Redis

Linux

Docker

Kubernetes

Tools

AWS

GCP

Azure

Job description

About Soket AI

Soket is an AI research firm headquartered in Bengaluru with a mission to build efficient and generalized intelligence for humanity. We are focused on advancing frontier AI research through the development of large-scale foundation models in math, code and reasoning that are open, energy-efficient, multilingual, and responsible by design. Funded and supported by the IndiaAI Mission , Government of India. Our work places a strong emphasis on India and the Global South, where access to high-quality AI systems remains limited despite immense linguistic and cultural diversity.

At Soket, we believe the future of AI should be accessible, scalable, and aligned with real-world societal needs. Our teams work across large language models, multimodal systems, speech technologies, reasoning systems, and large-scale AI infrastructure, with a strong focus on open research and practical deployment. We are deeply passionate about pushing the boundaries of AI research while building systems that are useful, trustworthy, and globally impactful.

Workloads you would be involved in

• Design, develop, and improve backend services powering Tensorstudio and Soket's enterprise AI services.
• Build scalable APIs and platform services for AI applications.
• Develop platform capabilities such as authentication, API management, usage metering, billing, payments, and account management.
• Build and maintain services and components in Rust (minimum 2 years production experience required), along with other backend technologies where appropriate.
• Integrate backend systems with third‑party libraries, AI providers, payment systems, and cloud services.
• Build asynchronous and distributed services for AI workloads.
• Design, deploy, and maintain cloud‑native services using Docker and Kubernetes.
• Build reusable SDKs, utilities, and developer tooling.
• Contribute to developer‑facing interfaces, dashboards, and analytics where required.
• Work with AI researchers and product teams to productionize AI capabilities.
• Participate in debugging, performance optimization, monitoring, and reliability improvements.

You are a good fit if you:

• Have 3–4 years of professional software engineering experience, preferably in backend, platform, infrastructure, or full‑stack development.
• Have strong hands‑on experience with Rust (minimum 2 years in production systems) and have built production‑quality software using Rust.
• Have experience building backend services, APIs, or distributed systems.
• Understand REST APIs, service architecture, databases, caching, and asynchronous processing.
• Can independently take ownership of a feature from implementation through testing and deployment.
• Write clean, maintainable, and well‑tested code.
• Are comfortable working across backend, infrastructure, and developer tooling when required.
• Enjoy solving platform, integration, scalability, and reliability problems.
• Are comfortable working in a fast‑moving startup environment.

You are a strong candidate if you have experience with:

• Rust — minimum 2 years of production experience (mandatory).
• Experience with at least one additional backend language such as Go (1+ year), Python (1+ year), or Node.js/TypeScript (1+ year).
• REST APIs and backend service development (2+ years).
• Streaming APIs or event‑driven systems (1+ year).
• PostgreSQL or similar relational databases (2+ years).
• Redis or similar caching / messaging systems (1+ year).
• Familiarity with asynchronous processing and distributed systems (1+ year).

Platform & Infrastructure

• Docker and Kubernetes.
• Authentication, authorization, and API security (1+ year).
• CI/CD and cloud deployments (1+ year).
• Monitoring, logging, and observability tools (1+ year).
• Familiarity with Linux and production debugging (2+ years).
• Experience building SDKs or developer tooling.
• Experience with cloud platforms such as AWS, GCP, or Azure (1+ year).

Nice to have

• Experience building AI/LLM APIs or AI infrastructure (1+ year preferred).
• Payment gateway integrations.
• Usage metering and billing systems.
• OpenMeter or similar metering systems.
• React or Next.js for internal dashboards.

Why work with Soket?

At Soket, you will get the chance to work on problems that only a handful of teams in the world are solving today - building frontier foundation models at scale. You will see first‑hand how intelligence is baked into large models and work across the entire stack that powers modern AI systems. You will work with supercomputing‑scale GPU clusters and tackle challenging problems in petabyte scale data aggregation and processing, distributed training, model architectures, infrastructure, inference optimization, and large‑scale AI deployment. One day you might be debugging CUDA kernels or NCCL issues, another day optimizing throughput for multi‑GPU training runs, building new infrastructure tooling, or experimenting with ideas that make training faster and more efficient. We are a deeply research‑driven and engineering‑focused team that loves nerding out about systems, scaling laws, training stacks, and AI research. If you enjoy going deep into technical problems and learning from highly talented researchers and engineers, you will feel right at home here. Most importantly, we are building efficient, open, and accessible AI systems for India, the Global South, and ultimately for humanity as a whole. If this sounds exciting to you, come build the future with us.

Soket AI Labs is a research‑first AI company headquartered in Bengaluru. We are an equal opportunity employer and strongly encourage applications from people of all genders, backgrounds, and ethnicities. We offer competitive compensation, equity participation opportunities, flexible work arrangements across office and remote settings, comprehensive leave policies including parental and wellness leaves, and regular team offsites designed to foster collaboration and innovation. As an AI-native organization, we use AI systems as part of our candidate assessment and interview processes. Please make sure your resume aligns with the job description. More details about how candidate data is processed and used will be available on the application page.