Lead Backend Engineer

Role: Lead Backend Engineer

Function: Backend Engineering

Location: Bangalore

Type: Full-time

Industry: Marketing Research, Data & Analytics, Consumer Insights

About Company

A global leader in data-driven marketing research, serving over 4,000 brands across Asia-Pacific. The company has over 25 years of experience and access to 130+ million consumer panelists worldwide.

It combines survey, behavioral, and purchase data to deliver actionable insights. Backed by approximately $848M in funding, it operates at meaningful scale.

The team moves fast, thinks deeply, and takes real ownership of its work.

Position Overview

As a Lead Backend Engineer, you will own the design, delivery, and operation of the company's core data and marketing platforms. You'll work end-to-end — from shaping requirements with product and business teams to running reliable production systems at scale. This role sits at the intersection of engineering excellence and real business impact.

Role & Responsibilities

• Design and evolve backend services on GCP, making deliberate trade-offs around scalability, reliability, maintainability, and cost
• Own backend systems end-to-end, including production stability, performance tuning, and incident resolution
• Build and deliver secure, scalable REST and gRPC APIs using Go, from development through production
• Collaborate with product managers and business stakeholders to translate requirements into sound technical solutions
• Modernise legacy systems through thoughtful refactoring, platform improvements, and infrastructure-as-code with Terraform
• Maintain high engineering standards through clean code, automated testing (Testcontainers, Pact), and rigorous code reviews
• Mentor junior engineers and actively contribute to building a strong, high-ownership engineering culture

Must Have Criteria

• 7+ years of experience building and owning backend systems for large-scale, production applications
• Proficiency in Go for backend service development (primary language for this role)
• Hands-on experience designing and operating REST and/or gRPC APIs at production scale
• Solid experience with relational databases (e.g., PostgreSQL/Cloud SQL) and managing production data at scale
• Experience with containerised deployments using Docker and Kubernetes in a CI/CD pipeline (GitHub Actions or equivalent)
• Demonstrated experience owning production systems — including on-call, incident response, and reliability improvements

Nice to Have

• 3+ years working with Google Cloud Platform — specifically GCP Kubernetes Engine, Cloud SQL, Pub/Sub, and Cloud Storage
• Experience with Infrastructure as Code using Terraform in a GCP environment
• Familiarity with observability tooling — specifically Datadog and OpenTelemetry for distributed tracing and monitoring
• Domain experience in market research, ad-tech, data platforms, or consumer analytics
• Contributions to open-source projects or active participation in technical communities
• Experience working with microservices architectures and contract testing tools like Pact

What We Offer

• Opportunity to build and own systems that power insights for 4,000+ global brands
• Work with a modern, well-defined tech stack — Go, GCP, Kubernetes, Terraform, Datadog
• Collaborative, high-ownership engineering culture with a strong focus on craft and impact
• Exposure to large-scale consumer data platforms across the Asia-Pacific region
• A team that invests in your growth