Senior Software Engineer - Backend

We're seeking an experienced Senior Software Engineer to own our Identity and Access platform end-to-end. Kuku is one of India's largest content platforms. This platform is the front door every user signs in through and the gate every request is checked against one of the highest-trust, highest-blast-radius parts of the product. We're a lean team with high ownership, and this is a role for someone who wants a critical service to be genuinely theirs. The ideal candidate has deep, hands-on experience with authentication and authorisation systems, sessions and tokens, and building secure, highly reliable backend infrastructure that stays up under load.

The candidate will have responsibilities across the following functions:

Identity and Access Architecture and Development:

• Own the authentication and authorisation platform end-to-end: design it, build it, run it, and improve it. It has to be secure and reliable above everything else.
• Own how users sign in: multiple sign-in methods behind one clean, consistent interface, so the rest of the product has a single dependable way to authenticate users no matter how they arrive.
• Own authorisation: who is allowed to do what across services
• Own the full life of sessions and tokens, from how they're issued and refreshed to how they're revoked.
• Integrate and manage third-party sign-in and identity providers, single sign-on (SSO), and multi-factor authentication (MFA).

Systems Reliability and Scaling:

• Keep the platform fast and always up; it sits on the critical path of every request.
• Build robust auth pipelines with monitoring, alerting, and fallback mechanisms.
• Own production issues on the service end-to-end, from the alert to the fix to making sure it can't happen again.
• Optimise backend services for performance, cost, observability, and reliability at consumer scale.

Security, Compliance and Governance:

• Keep the platform secure by default: how credentials are stored, how secrets are handled, and staying ahead of the usual ways identity systems get attacked.
• Implement best practices for tokenisation, encryption, and secure key/secret management.
• Maintain session integrity, audit logs, and support data-privacy and regulatory requirements.
• Think about how something gets abused or breaks, not just how it works.

Cross-Functional Collaboration:

• Work closely with product, platform, and security teams to give every service a dependable way to authenticate and authorise users.
• Mentor backend engineers and drive engineering excellence across the team.

Requirements:

• 4-6 years in backend engineering, with real production experience, not just side projects.
• Strong Python, with production experience in Django and Django REST Framework.
• You've designed and owned a critical backend service in production, ideally authentication or authorisation or something with a similar blast radius.
• You've built the internals yourself.
• A solid grasp of how sign-in, sessions, and access control actually work under the hood.
• A security-first instinct: you think about how something gets abused or breaks, not just how it works.
• Comfortable owning data that has to be both correct and fast, across PostgreSQL, Redis, and ClickHouse.
• You can pick up an unfamiliar live system, understand it deeply, and change it safely without disrupting the people already using it.

Preferred Skills:

• Experience integrating third-party sign-in and identity providers.
• Familiarity with single sign-on (SSO) and multi-factor authentication (MFA).
• Exposure to message queues and background task processing, such as Celery.
• Experience running a high-traffic, low-latency service where downtime is a company-wide problem.
• Prior work in a consumer product at real scale.
• Bachelor's or Master's in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred Tools and Technologies:

• Backend: Python (Django / Django REST Framework).
• Datastores: PostgreSQL, Redis, ClickHouse, MongoDB.
• Async / Queues: Celery, Kafka.
• Version Control: Git.