SarvaGram - Senior Backend Engineer - Platform engineering

Position- Senior Backend Engineer - Platform engineering
Company- SarvaGram

Website- https://www.sarvagram.com/

Linkedin- https://www.linkedin.com/compa...

Role Type- Full time 

Location- Pune

SarvaGram is building India’s first household centric, data led ‘high-tech high-touch’ FinTech platform to meet the growing aspirations of rural India, with a bouquet of financial and productivity enhancing offerings.
We achieve this by offering a suite of customized financial and capacity-building products designed to meet the unique requirements of rural households.
From loans and insurance solutions to innovative services like Farming-as-a-Service (FaaS), we equip rural communities with the tools they need to prosper.

About the role

Phoenix is the platform engineering squad - the team responsible for the shared backend infrastructure that all squads build on. API gateway, service mesh, shared platform services, the AI SDK integration layer, and the IAM/RBAC SDK are all Phoenix territory.

Senior Backend Engineers on Phoenix are building the surfaces other engineers use. Your customer is not the end borrower - it is the 12 squads that depend on Phoenix's APIs, SDKs, and shared services to build their features. Platform engineering is a product discipline, and the quality of what you build determines the velocity of the entire engineering organisation.

Key Responsibilities

Platform Service Development

• Build and maintain the shared backend platform services - the IAM/RBAC SDK, the AI SDK wrapper, the notification service, the event bus, and the feature flag system that every squad consumes

• Own the IAM/RBAC SDK implementation - translating the Cloud-Native Platform Architect's design into a production-ready SDK that twelve squads can integrate with confidence

• Build the AI SDK integration layer - the secure, consistent interface for squads to call LLM APIs with rate limiting, cost tracking, PII redaction, and fallback handling built in

• Design and implement the shared event bus patterns - how domain events are published, subscribed to, and replayed across services using SQS or Kafka

• Write the platform SDK documentation and integration guides that product squad engineers use to onboard themselves without requiring Phoenix involvement

API Gateway & Service Mesh

• Own the API gateway implementation - routing configuration, authentication enforcement, rate limiting rules, and the observability instrumentation that feeds into the platform monitoring stack

• Implement service mesh configuration for inter-service communication - mTLS, circuit breakers, retry policies, and traffic management for the twelve-service landscape

• Define and enforce API standards in collaboration with the Cloud-Native Platform Architect - contract-first development, OpenAPI spec, versioning, and backward compatibility discipline

• Build the API testing infrastructure - consumer-driven contract tests that catch breaking changes before deployment and give squads confidence in the API gateway configuration

AI-Native Platform Engineering

• Use Cursor and Claude as primary development tools - the Phoenix engineering standard is AI-augmented development; all code, tests, and documentation are AI-assisted

• Build the n8n and AppSmith integration hooks - the platform-level API endpoints and webhooks that allow Rangers' automations to interact safely with platform services

• Implement observability instrumentation across platform services - distributed tracing (OpenTelemetry), structured logging, and metrics that give the organisation visibility into platform health

Quality, Reliability & Mentoring

• Set and maintain code quality standards within Phoenix - code review, refactoring discipline, test coverage, and the mentoring of Intermediate and Associate engineers

• Own platform service reliability - SLO monitoring, incident response, and the postmortem process when platform services affect product squad delivery

• Contribute to the Platform Guild - share platform engineering knowledge, present implementation decisions, and participate in cross-squad technical discussions

Professional Experience

• 6 to 8 years in backend engineering with experience building shared services or platform components consumed by other teams - understanding that your customer is internal engineering is essential

• Has designed and maintained SDKs or shared libraries in production - knows what SDK stability means and has experienced the pain of breaking changes

• Experience with API gateway configuration and service mesh management in a microservices environment

• Active AI tool user - uses Cursor and Claude for development today; AI-assisted engineering is standard practice

Mindset & Soft Skills

• Platform identity: Platform identity: 'my customer is other engineers' - takes pride in developer experience, documentation quality, and SDK ergonomics

• Reliability: Reliability obsession: platform services fail twelve squads simultaneously when they go down - takes on-call, postmortems, and SLO management seriously

• AI-native: AI-native developer: Cursor and Claude open all day - models the AI-augmented engineering practice Phoenix is responsible for demonstrating

• Documentation: Documentation culture: platform code without great docs is unusable - writes runbooks, SDK guides, and ADRs as part of the definition of done

Technical Skills
Backend Engineering - Core
Java / Spring Boot & Microservices / platform service design
REST API design (OpenAPI) & Event-driven architecture (SQS / Kafka)
SDK design and development & Distributed systems patterns
Platform Engineering - Core
API gateway implementation & Service mesh (Istio / Linkerd)
IAM / OAuth2 / RBAC implementation & Feature flag systems
OpenTelemetry / distributed tracing  & Contract testing (Pact)
AI Native - Core Expectation
Cursor for daily development & Claude for coding and documentation

AI SDK integration design & LLM API patterns (rate limiting / fallback)  

Added advantage
Kotlin & AWS (API GW / SQS / Lambda
Kong / Envoy & Kafka

Domain-driven design

SarvaGram is on a mission to revolutionize financial services for millions in rural India. We're building the nation's first data-driven platform that combines cutting-edge technology with a human touch to unlock financial possibilities for underserved households.
This is your chance to be at the forefront of innovation. Join us and:
• Shape the future of FinTech: We're not just building a product, we're creating a new category. Be a part of defining the future of financial inclusion for rural India.
• Embrace a high-growth, high-impact environment: This is a non-linear growth opportunity. Build a platform used by millions and witness the network effect drive massive scale.
• Tackle real-world challenges: Apply your skills to solve critical problems and directly empower rural communities.
• Craft solutions that touch lives: Develop innovative products used by diverse household members, each with unique needs