Staff Software Engineer

We're Karat , the world's largest interviewing company. Karat is transforming organizations around the world. We provide a powerful system for technical leaders at companies like PayPal, Atlassian, and Citi who want to take control of how they hire top engineers, elevate their teams and contractors, and stay ahead. At the core of Karat’s system are live, expert-led interviews, analytics designed to give leaders maximum visibility, and the most robust interview performance dataset in the world.

Come join our Engineering team Our Software Engineering team is dedicated to building the world’s most predictive, inclusive, and fair interviewing products for our clients and technical candidates alike.

What you will do As a Staff Software Engineer at Karat, you'll lead the most complex, cross-team technical initiatives at the company and shape the direction of our engineering organization. You'll drive significant architectural improvements to our platform, set the technical vision for the systems your teams depend on, and bring Karat's technical voice into the room with clients, building trust, shaping product direction, and ensuring our most important relationships are grounded in deep technical credibility. Your impact will be felt not just in the code you ship, but in how the entire engineering organization builds.

This position requires a schedule that overlaps with U.S. business hours.

• Embrace AI-assisted development as a core part of your workflow; lead the team's thinking on how emerging techniques should shape Karat's engineering practices at scale.
• Lead the design and delivery of complex, cross-team technical initiatives, navigating ambiguity, aligning stakeholders, and driving projects through to production even when product direction is unclear.
• Own significant areas of Karat's technical stack, proactively identifying and proposing improvements that meaningfully advance developer experience and end-user outcomes.
• Design significant architectural changes to the platform, evaluating trade-offs at scale and ensuring decisions serve both current needs and long-term organizational health.
• Bring Karat's technical voice into the room with clients, building trust, shaping product direction, and ensuring our most important relationships are grounded in deep technical credibility.
• Mentor and elevate engineers across levels, contributing to a culture of technical excellence and continuous improvement.
• Champion engineering best practices across the organization, including testing strategy, performance optimization, and technical debt management.

The experience you will bring

• 10+ years of post-internship professional experience leading the architecture and delivery of large-scale, complex web applications and distributed systems in production; a demonstrated record of organizational-level technical impact
• Deep expertise in modern programming languages (Ruby, Python, React, TypeScript/JavaScript) with mastery of web frameworks, design patterns, and system design at scale
• Expert-level experience with microservices architecture, database optimization, and API design at scale (REST and GraphQL)
• Deep experience with cloud infrastructure, DevOps practices, and scalable deployment technologies (AWS, GCP, or Azure)
• Proven technical leadership across teams and initiatives, with a track record of driving organizational-level technical improvements
• Comfort engaging directly with clients or external stakeholders, with the ability to represent complex technical work clearly and build trust in a client-facing setting
• Interest in technical interviewing, talent assessment, or edtech is a strong plus

This position is only available to candidates residing in Bengaluru (formerly known as Bangalore). While our team operates 100% remotely, we are currently limiting hiring to this specific location. Applications from other cities in India will not be considered at this time. Applicants, please note: submissions not 100% in English will not be considered.