Website:
extindia.com
Job details:
About EXT India (Payroll & EoR)
EXT India simplifies the process of building and managing teams in India by acting as an Employer of Record (EoR), legally employing teams while clients maintain full control over their work and culture.
About Role & Application
Role: Backend Lead Architect
Location: Secunderabad (Hyderabad) (4 days a week WFO)
Fully Employed for and with Laters (laters.com)
Experience: 6+ Years of experience with minimum 2 years as a backend architect
Budget: 24-33 LPA (A major factor will be your previous drawn compensation)
How to Apply
Fill in this Google Form - https://forms.gle/f1wW32yvveV7YHkTA
Your applications will be directly reviewed by the hiring manager before setting up of interviews.
About Laters.com (Eventual Employer)
- Laters.com is one of Southeast Asia’s fastest-growing travel tech startups, reimagining how the world books flights.
- Headquartered in Singapore, we’re backed by a team that’s built at eBay, Agoda, Booking.com, ShopBack, and Hoolah.
- We’re not your typical OTA. We’re building a consumer product that integrates flexible payments like BNPL, crypto, and agentic AI to personalize the entire travel lifecycle from price tracking to carbon scoring to smart redemptions.
- We’re expanding fast across the US, UK, and Middle East. If you want to be part of a rocket ship with strong unit economics, big ambitions, and zero bureaucracy, this is your launchpad.
- We are not looking for a designer who wants to be handed neat little tickets and decorate them. We want a product designer who can help shape the work itself.
The Opportunity
We are hiring a Backend Lead Architect to own our server-side platform and every supplier integration that powers our inventory. You will report to the Head of Product & Engineering and own a vertical that spans the most business critical surfaces in the company: every supplier API we depend on, the queues and observability that hold it up, the defences that keep it economic, and the architecture that will let our booking stack serve more than our own storefront.
Our Stack and Architecture
You should be fluent in our stack from day one. Our platform runs on:
- Node.js and TypeScript across the backend
- MongoDB for primary data storage
- Vercel for hosting and serverless workloads, with a broader cloud migration ahead Queues, schedulers, retries, and webhook pipelines at meaningful scale
- Integrations with flight APIs (GDS, NDC, consolidators and aggregators) and BNPL, card and crypto payment rails
- A headless CMS layer
- Git, CI/CD pipelines, staging environments, and AI-assisted development as standard practice
What You Will Do
- Own every supplier integration end-to-end. Quality, reliability, and feature parity all land on you.
- Architect the backend platform for 10x scale: APIs, queues, observability, infrastructure, admin tooling, and the data model.
- Design the platform for consumption beyond our own storefront. Multi-tenancy, tenant isolation, partner-facing APIs, versioning, rate limiting, and partner onboarding, so the stack can serve other businesses as cleanly as it serves us.
- Own abuse and bot mitigation. Scraping and automated abuse are an existential cost problem for any OTA. Rate limiting, look-to-book management, fingerprinting and bot defence are yours.
- Support inventory and category growth, including integrating platforms we bring in rather than building every channel from scratch.
- Partner with the Payments lead on service boundaries and integration architecture where the backend meets their domain.
- Set the observability and on-call standard across the engineering team. Idempotency, retries, dead letter queues, alerting.
- Make sharp build-vs-buy calls on backend infrastructure and defend them with clear reasoning.
- Set priorities and defend them. Deciding what we build, what we defer, and making that case clearly to the business is part of the role.
- Mentor and grow the backend team, and set the bar for who joins it.
Who We Are Looking For
Non-negotiables
- Deep backend architecture experience at production scale. You have designed and run platforms that absorb real traffic with hard reliability constraints.
- Hands-on supplier or third-party integration experience. GDS, NDC, flight aggregators, payment processors, or any high-volume external API where downtime and bad data cost real money. You know what a retry storm feels like, you have written idempotency keys, and you have debugged a webhook race condition.
- You have exposed an internal platform to external parties. Multi-tenant systems, partner APIs, embedded SDKs, or white-label deployments. You understand tenant isolation, API versioning, rate limiting, and why the first external customer breaks assumptions the tenth one depends on.
- Senior fluency with queues, retries, idempotency, observability, and incident response. You can run a post-mortem and people leave the room aligned, not defensive.
- AI-native development workflow. You ship faster than your peers because of it, and you have strong opinions about where AI helps and where it hurts.
- Exceptional problem solving, critical thinking, and fluid intelligence. First-principles thinking on systems design. You ask the right questions, push back where it matters, and produce out-of-the-box solutions to ambiguous problems.
- Strong hands-on engineering in our stack: TypeScript and Node.js production experience, with a track record of shipping reliable backends. You will be writing code, not only reviewing it.
- Comfort with broad ownership and ambiguity. You prioritise ruthlessly, ship the things that matter, and are explicit about the trade-offs you are making.
- Fluent written and spoken English, with the ability to operate effectively across time zones.
Strongly preferred
- Travel, OTA, or flight aggregator backend experience.
- Bot mitigation, anti-scraping, or abuse defence at consumer scale.
- Platform integration after an acquisition or merger: reconciling two data models, running two stacks in parallel, retiring one without an outage.
- Extracting services out of a monolith, particularly around payments.
- MongoDB at scale.
- On-call leadership at OTA scale, with a real point of view on alerting hygiene.
- Designing APIs consumed by AI agents (MCP or equivalent), not only by humans and browsers. Prior experience growing and mentoring a small backend team.
How You Operate (Staff / Lead Level)
This is a staff / lead level role. Concretely, that means:
- Scope: You own the backend platform and every supplier integration end-to-end. You shape how the platform connects across domains.
- Autonomy: You set your own agenda based on business and technical priorities. You identify what needs doing before being asked.
- Impact: You multiply the output of other teams through clean APIs, reliable infrastructure, and high standards.
- Collaboration: You lead cross-functional projects spanning engineering, product, and operations. You coach engineers in your domain toward senior-level thinking.
What Success Looks Like
In the first 90 days
- A full audit of every supplier integration, with a documented quality baseline and a prioritised fix list. A standardised observability stack across all supplier flows: dashboards, alerts, error budgets. A backend on-call rotation in place, applied uniformly across the engineering team.
- A written backend roadmap, owned by you, that the Head of Product & Engineering can take to the leadership team.
In the first year
- The platform serving external partners cleanly, with a repeatable onboarding path for the next ones.
- Automated abuse under control, with look-to-book ratios and infrastructure cost both trending the right way.
- The backend platform absorbs a 10x growth in booking volume without re-architecture. A backend team you have hired, levelled, and grown.
- You are the go-to person for backend and supply architecture decisions across the company.
Click on Apply to know more.
