Full-Stack Engineer - Backend & Technical Delivery

Instinctive Studio is a Bangalore-based startup building digital products across education, enterprise tools and AI.

We're looking for a hands-on Full-Stack Engineer with strong backend and systems architecture experience. You'll contribute directly to the codebase while coordinating the day-to-day work of three to four junior developers.

This is not an HR or traditional people-management role. You won't handle salaries, appraisals or performance reviews. Your responsibility is technical delivery: breaking down work, maintaining the task pipeline, reviewing code, unblocking developers and keeping projects moving.

You'll work closely with a semi-technical founder, so you should be able to explain architecture, risks and trade-offs clearly and concisely.

Compensation: ₹60,000–₹90,000 per month.

WHAT YOU'LL BE DOING

Engineering and Architecture

• Build and ship production features using TypeScript, Node.js, Express, React and Next.js
• Design APIs, database schemas, authentication systems and background processes
• Translate product requirements into practical technical architecture
• Diagnose production issues, improve performance and refactor existing modules
• Make sensible architectural decisions without overengineering straightforward problems
• Handle deployments, patches, rollbacks and environment configuration
• Technical Delivery Coordination

Coordinate the work of three to four junior developers

• Break larger features into clear tasks with dependencies and acceptance criteria
• Maintain and prioritise engineering work in Linear and Notion
• Identify blockers and unclear requirements before they delay delivery
• Review progress and keep the founder informed about risks, decisions and changes in scope
• Ensure work moves properly through development, review, testing and deployment

Code Quality and Engineering Processes

• Review pull requests for correctness, security and maintainability
• Use CodeRabbit as part of the review process while applying your own engineering judgement
• Define, document and improve development SOPs as the company grows
• Establish practical standards for branches, pull requests, testing, releases and documentation
• Maintain coding conventions, architecture notes and release checklists
• Help junior developers improve their engineering habits and use AI tools responsibly

DevOps and Agentic Engineering

• Work with Vercel, AWS or Azure, Docker and CI/CD pipelines
• Monitor logs, errors, uptime and application performance
• Use coding agents to explore codebases, implement scoped work, refactor, test and document
• Review and verify agent-generated code before it reaches production
• Help define effective agentic engineering workflows for the wider development team

WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR

• 3+ years building and maintaining commercial web applications
• Strong experience with Node.js, Express and TypeScript
• Good working knowledge of React and Next.js
• Solid understanding of systems architecture, API design and database modelling
• Experience with MongoDB and/or PostgreSQL
• Familiarity with authentication, caching, queues and third-party integrations
• Working knowledge of cloud deployment, Docker, CI/CD and Git workflows
• Experience reviewing code and giving developers actionable feedback
• Ability to break complex requirements into well-scoped engineering tasks
• Experience coordinating work across a small development team
• Practical experience with coding agents such as Claude Code, Codex, Cursor or similar
• Clear written and spoken communication
• Comfortable working in a startup where some processes already exist and others still need to be created
• Strong ownership: you notice gaps, raise risks and help solve them

NICE TO HAVE

• Production experience with both Next.js and Vue.js
• Experience deploying and maintaining Node.js services on AWS or Azure
• Familiarity with Vercel deployments, previews and environment management
• Experience with Docker, GitHub Actions and CI/CD pipelines
• Familiarity with infrastructure-as-code and cloud configuration
• Experience with Redis, queues, background workers or real-time systems
• Familiarity with application monitoring, structured logging and error tracking
• Experience integrating AI services, vector databases or agentic product features
• Previous experience defining engineering SOPs or mentoring junior developers