Software Development Engineer IV

Job Description

About Porter

Porter is building the operating system for intra-city logistics in India. With ~20 million orders per month, 500K+ daily-active drivers, and rapid scale ahead (1.5x growth expected next year), we solve complex real-world problems at massive scale, balancing speed, reliability, and cost efficiency in a highly operational environment.

Role Overview

As an SDE 4 at Porter, you own a domain or platform spanning multiple services and set its technical direction. You’ll architect systems that hold up at Porter scale, influence priorities across teams without authority, and drive quarter-long technical roadmaps mapped to business KPIs. You’ll raise the engineering bar — through design reviews, mentorship of senior and junior engineers, and active participation in hiring — and shape how the team reasons about reliability, cost, and trade-offs.

You think from first principles, use AI as a force multiplier (and help others use it well), and ship systems that are reliable, observable, and economically sustainable at scale.

Key Responsibilities

Technical & System Design

• Architect and own multi-service systems and platforms handling millions of transactions — reasoning explicitly about service contracts, failure modes across boundaries, and cross-service observability.

• Drive high-level and low-level design across services — including build/buy/defer decisions framed by ROI and contribution-margin.

• Perform capacity planning, back-of-the-envelope calculations, and identify system bottlenecks early — at single-service and cross-service scope.

• Set technical direction for your domain via quarter-long roadmaps mapped to business KPIs; sequence delivery against tech-debt and operational risk.

• Lead engineering operations for your domain: SLIs/SLAs, MTTR/MTTA, automated remediation (auto-retry, throttles, autoscaling guards), zero-downtime migrations, and cost-per-transaction awareness.

Coding & Execution

• Write clean, maintainable, and testable production-grade code.

• Apply SOLID, design patterns, and modern engineering practices fluently.

• Treat code as mentorship — strong naming, non-obvious comments only, test coverage choices that signal intent, PR-worthy from the first commit.

• Design for extensibility under evolving requirements; preserve interfaces as the system grows through 2–3x changes.

• Use AI to accelerate delivery, validate its outputs critically, and introduce AI workflows that lift the team — not just yourself.

Ownership & Delivery

• Own end-to-end delivery — from idea to system design to production to long-term operation — across multiple services and quarters.

• Drive projects with high autonomy, navigate ambiguity by translating fuzzy business asks into sequenced plans with measurable outcomes, and deliver under tight timelines.

• Lead operational reviews, incident management, and system improvements for your domain — own postmortems, drive MTTR/MTTA down, and build the automation that prevents repeats.

• Run time-boxed experiments and DevEx upgrades (faster CI, parallel builds, standardized playbooks) with measurable impact.

Collaboration & Leadership

• Align teams around shared technical direction — surface integration gaps, organize cross-team forums, and mediate priority conflicts in Porter’s favor.

• Partner deeply with Product, Data, and Business stakeholders; turn fuzzy operational realities into clear technical trade-offs and build/buy/defer decisions.

• Mentor engineers across grades — set clear objectives for those you mentor, give specific, behaviour-based feedback, and surface early performance signals with measured action.

• Raise the bar in hiring — own interview debriefs, calibrate the panel, and contribute to onboarding and interview-loop improvements.

What We’re Looking For

Experience

• 7+ years of software development experience (SDE 4 or equivalent senior IC role).

• Proven track record owning and scaling production systems end-to-end — across multiple services/domains and multiple quarters.

• Demonstrated experience setting technical direction for a domain or platform and influencing teams without direct authority (via design reviews, RFCs, shared infra, hiring debriefs).

• Experience working in fast-paced, high-ownership environments (startups or scale-ups preferred).

Technical Skills

• Stron…