Backend Developer

We're looking for a Backend Engineer (Python) to join the core engineering team responsible for building and migrating critical backend infrastructure. You'll work closely with Pocket FM engineers on two high-impact initiatives: Migrating the media workflow platform to Temporal for durable workflow orchestration. Modernising the communication platform responsible for notifications, lifecycle messaging, and user engagement at massive scale. This role requires engineers who enjoy solving distributed systems challenges, owning services in production, and building highly reliable backend platforms.

Responsibilities:

• Design and develop scalable backend services using Python (FastAPI/Django/Flask).
• Build and maintain production-grade microservices and REST APIs.
• Own workflow migration to Temporal, including retries, idempotency, compensation logic, and failure recovery.
• Design and execute safe migration strategies using shadow traffic, phased rollout, validation, and rollback mechanisms.
• Build and maintain communication infrastructure for notifications, scheduling, delivery tracking, rate limiting, and vendor integrations.
• Design and optimise MySQL schemas, indexes, transactions, and large-scale database migrations.
• Develop Kafka producers and consumers with proper partitioning, consumer groups, offset management, replay strategies, and dead-letter queues.
• Deploy, monitor, and troubleshoot production services on AWS.
• Drive observability, performance optimisation, production debugging, and system reliability.

Requirements:

• 2.5-6 years of backend development experience with Python as the primary programming language.
• Hands-on experience with FastAPI, Django, or Flask.
• Strong knowledge of MySQL, including schema design, indexing, query optimisation (EXPLAIN), transactions, and online schema migrations.
• Production experience with Kafka (producers, consumers, consumer groups, offsets, retries, and DLQs).
• Experience building REST APIs and microservices.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems concepts such as retries, idempotency, partial failures, and delivery guarantees.
• Hands-on experience with AWS services.
• Experience with Docker, CI/CD pipelines, caching, observability, and system design.
• Good to Have: Temporal, Cadence, Airflow or AWS Step Functions; Go (Golang); Kubernetes; Terraform; Redis; PostgreSQL; Elasticsearch; gRPC and Protobuf; media or audio processing pipelines; and notification platforms (FCM, APNs, MoEngage, CleverTap, Braze, and Twilio).
• Experience building consumer-scale B2C platforms.
• Exposure to LLMs or GenAI platforms.
• Strong ownership mindset with the ability to independently design, build, deploy, and support production systems.
• Experience working in product companies or high-growth startup environments.
• Demonstrated experience building systems at scale, with the ability to discuss metrics such as request volume, QPS, data size, or event throughput.
• Excellent debugging, problem-solving, and communication skills.
• Passion for building reliable, scalable, and high-performance distributed systems.

Nice to Have Experience:

• Platform migrations (framework, database, cloud, or infrastructure).
• High-throughput event-driven systems.
• Production incident management.
• Performance optimisation at scale.