Senior Software Engineer

About Us

At Vahan, we are building India’s first AI-powered recruitment marketplace for the country’s 300 million-strong blue-collar workforce, opening doors to economic opportunities and brighter futures. Already India’s largest recruitment platform, Vahan is backed by marquee investors like Khosla Ventures, Y Combinator, LemmaTree (a Temasek-founded investing firm), Persol Group, Bharti Airtel, Vijay Shekhar Sharma (CEO, Paytm), and senior executives from Google and Facebook. Our customers include leading names such as Swiggy, Zomato, Rapido, Zepto, and many more. We leverage cutting-edge technology and AI to help these companies recruit at scale and with precision.

Our vision is ambitious: to become the go-to platform for blue-collar professionals worldwide, empowering them with not just earning opportunities but also the tools, benefits, and support they need to thrive.

Our mission is to impact over a billion lives globally, creating a future where everyone has access to economic prosperity. If our vision excites you, Vahan might just be your next adventure.

We’re on the hunt for driven individuals who love tackling big challenges. If this sounds like your kind of journey, dive into the details and see where you can make your mark.

This is a senior individual contributor role with technical leadership responsibilities . You’ll stay hands-on while driving the technical direction, scalability, and quality of critical backend systems.

You will act as a go-to engineer for backend architecture, scalability challenges, production reliability, and engineering excellence — influencing teams through strong technical leadership rather than people management.

What You’ll Do

Backend Ownership & Scalability

• Own the design, evolution, and reliability of high-impact backend systems and services.
• Drive improvements in scalability, maintainability, and system performance.
• Lead initiatives addressing tech debt, architectural gaps, and scale challenges.

System Design & Architecture

• Design scalable distributed systems with a focus on correctness and long-term evolution.
• Architect APIs, data models, async workflows, and service boundaries.
• Make pragmatic trade-offs balancing speed and engineering quality.

Code Quality & Engineering Excellence

• Drive high standards through code reviews, design reviews, and refactoring.
• Simplify brittle systems and establish maintainable engineering patterns.
• Introduce best practices and guardrails to improve development velocity and reliability.

Database & Performance Optimization

• Diagnose and solve PostgreSQL performance bottlenecks.
• Optimize schemas, indexes, queries, and data access patterns.
• Work with caching layers, async messaging systems (RabbitMQ or similar), and analytics pipelines (ClickHouse or equivalent).

Technical Leadership

• Mentor backend engineers on debugging, architecture, and systems thinking.
• Influence engineering direction through technical clarity and execution excellence.
• Champion strong engineering principles and operational ownership.

Production Reliability

• Own production issues, incident resolution, and postmortems.
• Improve observability, monitoring, and operational readiness.
• Reduce operational overhead through long-term system improvements.

What We’re Looking For

Core Requirements

• 7+ years of backend engineering experience.
• Strong expertise in Node.js.
• Deep experience with PostgreSQL and database performance tuning.
• Experience designing and operating distributed systems in production.
• Strong ownership mindset from architecture to production support.

Strong Plus

• Experience with RabbitMQ or similar messaging systems.
• Exposure to ClickHouse or large-scale analytics systems.
• Hands-on experience with AWS infrastructure and deployments.
• Strong debugging, observability, and reliability engineering skills.

Engineering Mindset

• You enjoy untangling complex systems and improving existing architectures.
• You value clean abstractions, readable code, and pragmatic engineering.
• You think deeply about systems, trade-offs, scalability, and long-term impact.
• You understand where testing creates the highest leverage.

Leadership Without Authority

• You influence through clarity, reasoning, and execution.
• You can challenge scope/timelines when system health is at risk.
• You actively raise the engineering bar for the broader team.

***Why J…