Back End Developer

Role: Senior Backend Engineer (SDE-3) WFO Bangalore | 5+ years | AI-native IT Services

About TPH The Product Highway is an AI-native product strategy and engineering firm. We partner with businesses from the earliest spark of an idea through to enterprise scale — growing from zero to multi-million ARR in our first year, working with clients across India, APAC, Europe, and North America. AI got very good at the how — shipping code faster than ever. But almost nothing has changed in the what: deciding what to build, why, and in what order. That's where we live. From in-house AI project managers to near-universal adoption of Cursor and Claude, we've rethought every conventional process from first principles. The result: legacy systems rebuilt in under 6 months, enterprise platforms in under 3, mobile apps shipped in under 1. We only take on problems we find genuinely interesting, and we refuse to ship anything we wouldn't stand behind. Every hire gets us closer to that standard.

Who we're looking for Regardless of role, every person at TPH shares these traits:

End-to-end owners. You own outcomes, not tasks. If something falls through a crack, that's on you — not because someone assigned it, but because you wouldn't have it any other way.

Uncompromising on quality. You have a quality bar that's yours, not your manager's. You won't ship something you wouldn't stand behind, even under deadline pressure.

AI-obsessed. You see AI as how work gets done, not a nice-to-have. If you're still doing something manually that AI could handle, you feel that as friction, not normalcy.

Structured thinkers. When faced with an ambiguous problem, you break it down, reason through the trade-offs, and arrive at a position — not wait for someone to tell you the answer.

Experienced enough to use AI systematically. You have enough depth in your craft that AI makes you dangerous, not dependent. You direct it, evaluate its output, and know when it's wrong.

Why we're hiring TPH builds products for clients across fintech, ecommerce, SaaS, enterprise data, and consumer apps. Every one of these needs a backend that works reliably at scale, integrates cleanly with real-world systems, and is architected in a way junior engineers can build within without breaking things. At SDE-3, we're not looking for someone who can build excellent backend systems — we're looking for someone who sets the standard for how TPH builds backends. You define the architecture patterns, make the hard infrastructure calls, mentor the engineers around you, and represent TPH's technical depth directly to clients. You're the technical anchor on the hardest problems.

What you'll do 1. Own backend architecture end-to-end — API design, data modeling, service boundaries, caching, queue architecture, scaling. You're setting the architecture, not inheriting it. 2. Define and evolve backend engineering standards at TPH — API conventions, database patterns, error handling, testing strategy, AI workflow practices. What you establish becomes the team's baseline. 3. Mentor SDE-1 and SDE-2 engineers through code reviews, architecture walkthroughs, and technical design feedback. You make the engineers around you meaningfully better. 4. Lead client-facing technical conversations — discovery sessions, translating business requirements into architecture plans, representing TPH's engineering standards to stakeholders. 5. Build systems for real-world complexity — multi-tenant platforms, high-throughput data pipelines, LLM-backed systems, complex integrations with CRMs, ERPs, and payment systems. 6. Write production code in Python (FastAPI/Django) or Node.js (Express/NestJS) — pick what fits the project and execute at a high standard. 7. Step across the stack when needed — fix a frontend bug, adjust a React component. You don't let a small change become a blocker when you can just fix it. 8. Debug and resolve production issues under pressure — reading logs, tracing errors through distributed systems, shipping a fix without panicking.

Must-haves 1. 5+ years building backend systems in production — APIs, databases, background jobs, complex integrations. Real scale, real business complexity, not just CRUD apps. 2. Deep expertise in Python (FastAPI/Django) or Node.js (Express/NestJS) — opinionated enough to make architecture decisions, flexible enough to pick up the other stack when needed. 3. Deep comfort with PostgreSQL — schema design for complex domains, query optimization, migrations, indexing strategy. 4. Has made architecture decisions independently at scale — queues vs. crons, when to denormalize, when to split a service, when to keep it simple. You've made these calls on production systems and lived with them. 5. Has mentored engineers demonstrably — code reviews, architecture feedback, direct coaching. You've made other backend engineers better. 6. Has deployed and operated production systems — CI/CD, Docker, AWS/GCP. You ship your code and operate it, you don't hand it off. 7. Comfortable across the stack — fix a frontend issue, adjust an API response for a UI need, unblock the team without filing a ticket.

Strong pluses 1. Has built AI/ML-adjacent backend systems — LLM integrations, RAG pipelines, vector databases, embedding retrieval. You understand what makes these hard in production. 2. Has designed multi-tenant architectures — shared infrastructure serving multiple clients with proper isolation, billing, and access control. 3. Has led backend teams or acted as technical lead in a consulting or services environment. 4. Data engineering experience — pipeline architecture, data warehouse design, analytics infrastructure.

AI-native expectations 1. At SDE-3, you're not just using AI tools — you're defining how TPH's backend engineers use them. 2. Uses Cursor or Claude Code as primary development environment daily — production code through AI-assisted workflows. 3. Sets AI workflow standards for the team — CLAUDE.md templates, .cursorrules patterns, plan-first development practices. What you systematize, others inherit. 4. Uses AI for test generation, documentation, structured debugging, and code review — but never ships AI output without reading it. 5. Coaches SDE-1 and SDE-2 engineers on AI-assisted development — prompting habits, review quality, holding the bar on AI-generated code.

Not the right fit if 1. You want to work on one product for years — this is a services role. The variety is a feature. 2. You think senior engineering is about writing better code, not raising the team's ceiling. 3. You've never mentored or led technically — we need someone who's made other engineers better, not just someone who's very good individually. 4. You refuse to touch frontend code, or need detailed specs before making technical decisions. 5. You don't use AI tools daily in your current work.

How to apply Send your resume and a short note on why this role excites you to anju@theproducthighway.com. No templates — just tell us what you'd bring to TPH, what technical problems you've led, and why building across multiple products at the frontier of AI-native development sounds like the right kind of challenge. -