SDE II - Backend & Distributed Systems

Location : Electronic city, Bangalore, India (on-site)

Role Type : Full-time

About Us :

Ratch.ai is a deep-tech company building real-time intelligence systems that fuse live operational data, sensor feeds, geospatial context, and AI to help decision-makers see what others miss. Our platforms power critical maritime, defence, and infrastructure operations where reliability is non-negotiable.

We are building a brand-new product centered on large-scale satellite imagery processing. Our engineering organisation is structured into three parallel teams - application stack, data stack, and AI stack - that work largely independently and integrate only where data or APIs must flow between them.

Position Overview :

This is the first application-stack hire for our new satellite imagery product. You will own the application layer end-to-end - starting from a blank slate. You'll define the high-level architecture, make the key technology decisions, build the APIs and web interfaces, and grow into leading a small team as the product scales.

What You'll Do :

- Design and build high-performance backend services and distributed systems that power our satellite imagery platform.

- Take end-to-end ownership of the application stack - from high-level and low-level design through development, deployment, and operations.

- Make architectural decisions such as database and framework selection, backed by clear data-driven reasoning.

- Build and operate microservices at scale, optimising for latency, throughput, and cost-efficiency.

- Develop APIs and, in the early phase, front-end interfaces before a dedicated front-end engineer joins.

- Collaborate with AI-stack and data-stack engineers when data or API integration is required.

- Mentor and guide junior engineers, growing into a team lead role as the product expands.

What You'll Bring :

Must-Have :

- 4+ years of professional backend software engineering experience.

- Strong proficiency in asynchronous Python and FastAPI.

- Deep understanding of distributed systems concepts : consensus, replication, partitioning, CAP theorem, and eventual consistency.

- Hands-on experience building and operating microservices at scale.

- Experience with MongoDB and cloud-native technologies (GCP or AWS, Docker, Kubernetes).

- Solid grasp of data structures, algorithms, and system design.

- Strong ownership mindset and the ability to work independently from day one.

Good-to-Have :

- Experience with React for building front-end interfaces.

- Familiarity with Terraform and infrastructure-as-code.

- Experience mentoring or leading small engineering teams.

- Background from a product-focused engineering environment.