Required Skills : CI/CD Pipeline, Data Structures, Microservices, Determining overall architectural principles, frameworks and standards, Cloud expertise (AWS, GCP, or Azure), Distributed Systems

What This Role Is All About :

Were looking for a Backend Tech Lead who thrives at the intersection of big-picture architecture and meticulous engineering craftsmanship.

Someone who can design systems that elegantly handle massive traffic while also rolling up their sleeves to diagnose that one strange memory leak at 3 AM. In this role, youll guide a small, highly capable backend team, own the technical roadmap, and ensure our systems remain fast, lean, scalable, and truly battle-tested.

If youre passionate about building high-impact backend platforms that power millions of usersand you love solving problems that most people never even seethis role is for you.

What Youll Own :

As the Backend Tech Lead, you will take end-to-end ownership of our core backend systems and technical evolution. You will :

- Architect large-scale backend systems designed to handle India-level load, high concurrency, and unpredictable spikeswithout ever compromising stability or user experience.

- Build, enhance, and maintain microservices, APIs, and internal platforms that form the backbone of our product ecosystem. These are the systems the entire app relies on, making your role central to our success.

- Mentor and guide backend engineers, offering technical direction, conducting design reviews, and ensuring every contribution aligns with our coding standards and long-term vision.

- Collaborate closely with Product, Data, and Infrastructure teams, ensuring backend capabilities match business needs while maintaining reliability, performance, and developer productivity.

- Set and uphold high engineering standards related to architecture patterns, code quality, automation, observability, and testing.

- Lead system design reviews and architectural discussions, taking ownership of decisions around databases, caching layers, queues, and fault-tolerant distributed systems.

- Keep production in top shape by actively monitoring metrics, logs, performance indicators, and uptime signalsanticipating problems before they become incidents.

- Identify technical gaps and inefficiencies and proactively push solutions instead of waiting for bottlenecks or outages to surface.

Your job is not just to write codeits to build systems that stand the test of scale, time, and real-world chaos.

What Makes You a Great Fit :

You will thrive in this role if you bring :

- 6+ years of deep backend engineering experience, with 1-2 years spent leading engineers, owning critical systems, or driving architectural decisions.

- Expertise in one strong backend languageNode.js, Go, Java, or Python. Pick your sword, but wield it well.

- A solid understanding of distributed systems, high-availability architectures, fault-tolerance mechanisms, caching strategies, and microservices patterns.

- Hands-on experience with AWS or GCP, containerization with Docker, orchestration via Kubernetes, and modern CI/CD pipelines.

- A mindset where data structures and system design are tools for daily engineering, not just interview concepts.

- A commitment to writing clean, maintainable, future-proof code that saves time and reduces operational burden.

- Strong communication skills, a collaborative approach, and a lets figure it out attitudeespecially when things get ambiguous or messy.

Bonus Points If You Have :

While not mandatory, the following traits or experiences make you stand out :

- Experience building or scaling consumer apps with millions of daily active users, especially in markets with unpredictable load patterns.

- Exposure to event-driven architecture, pub/sub systems, message queues, or real-time data pipelines.

- A love for fast-paced startups and the willingness to wear multiple hatsfrom architecture to hands-on coding to firefighting.

- Familiarity with modern observability stacks like Grafana, Prometheus, ELK, Jaeger, or OpenTelemetry.

Why Lokal Might Be Your Best Move :

Joining Lokal means joining a mission-driven team building for Bharatwhere scale is massive, constraints are real, and the impact is tangible. Heres why this could be the opportunity youve been searching for :

- Your work will touch millions of real users across India who rely on Lokal for daily needs and local information.

- Youll enjoy true ownership from day oneyour architectural decisions will influence the entire engineering stack and long-term tech strategy.

- We operate with minimal hierarchy and maximum transparency, giving you direct access to founders, senior leadership, and cross-functional collaborators.

- Youll be part of a team that values quality, speed, and meaningful impactnot one at the expense of the other.

At Lokal, you get to build for one of the toughest engineering environments in the world : large populations, diverse devices, connectivity limitations, and enormous scalemaking this a rare chance to solve real, complex, and rewarding engineering challenges.