blowtrumpet
Website:
blowtrumpet.com
Job details:
South Delhi · On-site · Full-time
A rare shape of role, described honestly.
Most companies split this into four jobs: someone who decides what gets built, someone who designs how it works underneath, someone who writes it, and someone who makes it look like something worth using. We have watched that split produce products where each layer is defensible and the whole thing is mediocre.
We are looking for one person who can hold all four — not equally, but with enough range that the seams between them stop existing.
Blowtrumpet is building a programmatic advertising stack from first principles: a DSP, an SSP, an exchange, and the platform beneath them. Real-time bidding at global scale is one of the harder problems in commercial software — bid windows measured in tens of milliseconds, auction logic that has to stay correct under load, infrastructure economics that punish every wasted cycle. It is also an industry where almost nobody has taken interface design seriously. The tools traders and publishers use every day are dense, hostile, and unchanged since 2014.
Both of those are opportunities. We want someone who sees both.
Credentials
Graduates of tier-1 engineering institutes are preferred, and we say so plainly rather than filtering quietly at screening.
That preference is not absolute. Exceptional ability — in engineering, in design, or in the rare combination of both — demonstrated in work we can examine will override it.
What is not negotiable is the degree itself. A completed engineering graduate qualification is required regardless of institution.
What the role actually is
Founder's office. You sit close to the decisions. You research the market, form a view, write it down, and argue for it. BRDs, PRDs, system specifications, technical guides. Documents that engineering can build from without a follow-up meeting.
Systems architect. You decide how the pieces fit — service boundaries, data models, where state lives, what fails first under load, and what that costs. Latency budgets are not an afterthought here; they are the constraint everything else is designed around.
Software developer. You write production code. Not prototypes handed off to someone else. The architecture you argue for is the architecture you are accountable for building.
Ad-tech designer. You design the surfaces — dashboards, campaign builders, reporting, the interfaces where dense data has to become legible fast. Wireframes, user journeys, interface design in Figma and professional Adobe tools. Design here is not decoration applied at the end; it is a claim about how the system should be understood.
What we are looking for
Engineering depth
- Grip over algorithms and logical structure — the ability to see the shape of a problem and reason about what happens when input grows by three orders of magnitude
- Advanced engineering fluency: concurrency, memory behaviour, distributed correctness, systems design at the level where abstractions leak
- A demonstrated instinct for automation. You have looked at a manual process and made it disappear, more than once
Design sensibility
- Future-ready aesthetics. Not trend-following — an eye for what will still look considered in five years, and the reasoning to explain why
- Wireframing and user journey design as thinking tools, not deliverables
- Fluency in Figma and professional Adobe tools
- The discipline to hold visual consistency across a growing product surface
Range and temperament
- Strong communication. You will write for engineers, for partners, and for the market, and the register has to change between them
- Lateral thinking — the willingness to ask whether the standard approach is right, and the rigour to be correct about it more often than not
- Landscape awareness. You read about your field. You can see an industry's potential before it becomes consensus
- Drive. This role rewards people who arrive with things they want to build and the stubbornness to see them through
The stack
Chosen per architectural requirement, not per fashion.
Services and platform: BunJS, NestJS, Next.js, Deno — runtime chosen to fit the workload rather than standardised for comfort.
Data: MongoDB and PostgreSQL, used for what each is actually good at.
Core products: C++ and Java. The parts of the system where latency and throughput are the product, not a feature of it.
You will not know all of this. Nobody does. Be strong in some of it, capable of getting strong in the rest quickly, and honest about which is which.
Terms
On-site, South Delhi. Hardware and software in person, in the room, with the team. Architecture arguments happen at a whiteboard. Design reviews happen with three people around one screen.
Serious about ad-tech. Not a side project, not a contract, not something to run alongside other work. We are early enough that half-commitment is worse than none.
Early-stage bootstrapping. No large safety net, constraints on everything. In exchange: real ownership, decisions that are yours, and a product you shaped rather than inherited.
How we hire
Expect a long technical conversation, a problem you work through with us rather than for us, a review of design work you have done, and a discussion of something you built where we keep asking why until we reach the bottom of your reasoning.
We are looking for the bottom to be deep.
How to apply
Visit our website before you apply. Include your PIN code in your CV. When asked in the interview process, provide Flight No. AI 176 for ready reference.
Send your CV, a portfolio or link to design work, and a note covering:
- The most technically difficult thing you have built, and what made it difficult
- A piece of software you think is beautifully designed, and a defence of that claim that goes beyond taste
- A widely accepted engineering or design practice you think is wrong, and your reasoning
- What you find structurally interesting — or structurally broken — about programmatic advertising
Applications without the note will not be reviewed.
Click on Apply to know more.
