Senior Software Engineer

ABOUT KEKA

Keka HR is redefining how businesses across the globe manage their most valuable asset — their people. With over 10,000 companies trusting our platform and a product that has earned one of the highest customer satisfaction scores in the HR technology space, we are at an inflection point. We need engineers who don’t just write code they architect the future.

As a Senior Software Engineer at Keka, you won’t just be closing tickets — you’ll be building the product that thousands of businesses run on every day. This is an opportunity to take real ownership, solve genuinely hard problems, and grow into a technical leader alongside some of the best engineers in the industry.

WHY KEKA

• Greenfield at Scale — Build and own foundational systems from the ground up — multi-tenant architecture, distributed workflows, real-time event-driven pipelines — while serving millions of end-users across global enterprises.
• Technical Depth, Not Just Breadth - You’ll tackle problems that demand mastery of distributed systems theory, not just framework knowledge. Think consensus protocols, CQRS at scale, eventually consistent data models, and zero-downtime migrations across continents.
• Founder-Led, Engineer-First Culture - Keka was built by engineers who believe great software changes industries. Technical excellence isn’t a talking point here — it’s how decisions are made. You’ll have direct access to leadership and the mandate to drive architectural decisions.
• Hyper-Growth with Enterprise DNA - We combine the speed and ambition of a high-growth startup with the engineering rigour required to serve Fortune 500 companies. You get the best of both worlds — move fast and build things that last.
• Impact at a Category-Defining Moment - Keka is building the operating system for the modern workforce. The systems you architect today will underpin how millions of people experience work. This is a once-in-a-career platform play.

THE ROLE

This is a hands-on individual contributor role. You will be a core engineer on a single squad — the person your team trusts to take a feature from requirement to production and make it work well. You lead through the quality of your code, your designs, and the way you help the engineers around you. There are no direct reports attached to this role.

Your scope is the features and modules your squad owns. You work closely with your Lead Software Engineer on larger design decisions, and you are measured by the quality of what you ship and how reliably it runs in production.

WHAT YOU WILL OWN

• Own the end-to-end delivery of features and modules within your squad — from understanding requirements to design, build, release, and support.
• Write production code every sprint across the full stack — building clean, responsive user interfaces as well as the backend services and APIs behind them.
• Prepare clear low-level designs and contribute to your squad’s system design discussions, applying sound object-oriented principles and proven design patterns.
• Build and maintain APIs, data models, and background workflows — keeping them well-structured, well-tested, and easy for other engineers to work with.
• Develop reusable components and libraries that help your squad build faster and more consistently.
• Keep what you build fast and dependable — profiling performance, optimising slow paths, and making sure features hold up as usage grows.
• Support production quality: add the right logging and monitoring, help respond to incidents, debug issues, and contribute to root-cause analyses and lasting fixes.
• Uphold the engineering bar in your squad — meaningful tests, thoughtful code reviews, and healthy CI/CD and deployment practices.
• Mentor junior engineers through pairing and code reviews, helping them grow in confidence and craft.
• Collaborate closely with your Product Manager, Designer, and Lead Software Engineer to clarify scope, flag technical risk early, and make pragmatic trade-offs.
• Build proofs of concept to explore new approaches and technologies, and bring back clear recommendations to the squad.
• Help reduce technical debt — spotting code that needs attention and improving it as part of everyday work.

TECHNICAL COMPETENCIES REQUIRED

• Design Fundamentals Strong grasp of object-oriented design, SOLID principles, and design patterns. Able to turn a feature into a clean low-level design and explain the trade-offs behind it.
• **Backend En…