Backend Lead

Role Summary

We are seeking an experienced Lead Backend Engineer with over 10 years of experience to take ownership of backend architecture and system design, while remaining actively involved in development. This position is ideal for an individual already making significant architectural decisions. You will be responsible for designing, building, and evolving distributed backend systems, establishing architectural standards, and guiding teams through complex technical challenges.

Core Responsibilities

System Design / Architecture: Design comprehensive backend systems prioritizing scalability, resilience, and maintainability. Define service boundaries, data ownership, and communication protocols. Select and implement appropriate architectural patterns such as modular monoliths, microservices, event-driven systems, or layered and hexagonal architectures. Lead trade-off analyses concerning performance, cost, and complexity. Produce detailed architecture diagrams, Architecture Decision Records (ADRs), Data Flow Diagrams, and technical design documents.

Backend Engineering: Develop high-performance backend services utilizing Python and FastAPI. Build and maintain robust RESTful APIs and asynchronous services. Manage concurrency, background processing, and I/O-intensive tasks. Uphold clean code practices, SOLID principles, and testability. Conduct code reviews focused on correctness, performance, and long-term design integrity.

Data Engineering: Design and optimize schemas for Relational Database Management Systems (RDBMS) like PostgreSQL and MySQL, focusing on indexing, query optimization, transactions, and isolation levels. Develop data models for NoSQL databases such as MongoDB, DynamoDB, and Redis. Select appropriate data stores based on access patterns and consistency requirements. Manage data migrations, versioning, and backward compatibility.

Distributed Systems: Engineer systems capable of handling partial failures, implementing retries, timeouts, and idempotency, and supporting horizontal scaling. Gain experience with message brokers and asynchronous communication tools like Kafka, RabbitMQ, or SQS. Understand consistency models, eventual consistency, and data replication strategies.

DevOps / Cloud: Work within cloud environments such as AWS, Azure, or GCP. Containerize services using Docker and deploy them via CI/CD pipelines. Understand Kubernetes concepts (pods, services, autoscaling) or equivalent managed services. Collaborate with DevOps/SRE teams on observability, logging, and monitoring solutions.

Technical Leadership: Serve as the technical owner for backend systems. Mentor senior and mid-level engineers. Establish engineering standards and best practices. Collaborate closely with product and business stakeholders to translate requirements into effective technical designs.

Additional Qualifications

Demonstrated experience in designing and evolving large-scale systems. Practical experience with cloud services and deployments. Proven ability to lead technical decision-making and architectural discussions. Experience in migrating monolithic architectures to microservices, or making informed decisions against it. Familiarity with event-driven or streaming systems. Experience with API gateways, rate limiting, and authentication systems (OAuth2, JWT). Prior roles as a Senior Backend Developer, Tech Lead, or Solution Architect are highly valued.

About the Company

The Murugappa Group is a 125-year-old conglomerate with a significant presence across India and globally. With diverse businesses spanning agriculture, engineering, and financial services, the Group's portfolio includes 10 listed companies and major entities like Cholamandalam MS General Insurance Company Limited and Parry Agro Industries Limited. Renowned brands such as Ajax, Hercules, BSA, and Chola are part of its esteemed portfolio. The Group's business interests encompass a wide range of products and services, including abrasives, technical ceramics, electric vehicles, auto components, fertilizers, and sugar. Guided by its core values of integrity, passion, quality, respect, and responsibility, and fostering a culture of professionalism, the Group employs 94,041 individuals.

Terms & Conditions

This is a full-time, onsite position located in Chennai, India.