Lead Backend Engineer

As Founding Backend Lead in Bangalore, you will set technical direction for that layer during the company's zero-to-one chapter. You will own system design choices that let a consumer startup move fast without painting itself into a corner as traffic grows.

Responsibilities:

• Lead backend architecture and delivery for Aurora's core services during the zero-to-one phase.
• Design systems for AI-heavy workloads: queues, orchestration, storage, and APIs that stay fast as volume grows.
• Drive production scale and operational excellence, including observability, failure modes, and performance under real traffic.
• Mentor engineers and partner with product, mobile, and AI teams to ship end-to-end outcomes.

Requirements:

• 4-10 years of backend engineering experience, including leadership during a consumer startup's zero-to-one phase.
• Strong system design skills with production ownership of services at meaningful scale.
• Experience building AI-heavy backend systems or integrating model-powered workflows into reliable services.
• Operational rigour: you care about dashboards, alerts, and the path from incident to permanent fix.

Nice to have:

• Strongly preferred: you've been a founder, co-founder, CTO, or founding engineer before. You've built a backend from zero with no playbook, and you know what it takes to scale it.
• Mobile-startup or consumer-app backend experience around the 0→100k active-user ride.
• Familiarity with distributed systems, queues, and event-driven architectures.
• Prior tech-lead or engineering-manager experience in a lean team.
• IIT/BITS/NIT graduate preferred.