SARAL - Sr. Backend Engineer - Job Description
Quick Highlights
- Role: Be part of the core engineering team at a company with the mission to build the world’s best influencer operating system to power partnerships between e-commerce brands and creators.
- Reports to: Head of Engineering
- Stage: Lean team of 15 total, 4 engineers. Completely Remote role.
- Growth: Bootstrapped and profitable to over 200 US-based brands. Crossed $1M ARR.
- Opportunity for Impact: If you want to build clean, user-facing products and help scale a best-in-class software company to massive growth, this is your chance.
- Compensation: Rs. 30 LPA to Rs. 40 LPA ( flexible for the right candidate )
- Team: You will be one of two backend engineers, and work directly with the Head of Engineering, Product Lead, and Founder.
- Work: You'll have the opportunity to own core parts of Saral end-to-end. Unlike larger orgs with rigid handoffs between DevOps, DBAs, and Architects, our engineers make their own decisions, work across the stack, and ship faster — eliminating unnecessary delays and maximising impact.
- Transitions to: Backend Lead role in 8 months to 1 year
We will prioritise / expedite your application if you’ve Open Source contributions or presented at well-known technical conferences. Be sure to highlight this in your email or resume.
Read below for details! 👇
đź‘‹ About SARAL
SARAL - Influencer Relationship Management
SARAL is an influencer relationship management platform for Ecommerce businesses to find, reach out, manage, and track performance of the influencers they work with. We’re a self-funded company from India, selling primarily to US-based brands.
Find out more on our website and read the origin story.
Our mission is to be the simplest results-oriented influencer marketing platform DTC brands use for all-things that involve creators. SARAL exists so brands can seamlessly build & maintain relationships with creators.
You’d be a fit if…
You’ve held a Backend Engineer position before and have at least 5 years of experience. You have exceptional technical skills, a hunger to learn more, want to build interesting features that customers pay for, and work in a lean team.
You enjoy coding, have a bias for action, and are solution-oriented. You want to build towards this India 3.0 vision.
You understand and empathise with our customers. You proactively watch user sessions, understand the product and design side of things, and truly get what we solve for with every feature.
You should not apply if
- You don’t have at least 2 years of experience working at a single company. Without this, you don’t see the consequences of your decisions.
- You can’t work hard. We’re a self-funded company from India up against billion-dollar VC-backed companies. We have to work harder. If you want to shy away from that or have other constraints that don’t allow you to work hard, you shouldn’t apply.
- You’re not passionate about coding. If writing code is just a paycheck and you’re okay with mediocre solutions, shortcuts, and piling up tech debt, Saral is not the place for you. We care deeply about craftsmanship, specially with AI handling the grunt work - we take pride in building things the right way.
- You don’t have an eye for quality. Our primary market is the US, and it’s unforgiving. We care about shipping quality software that works.
- You’re not product & customer-obsessed. If you only care about the core technology without having the curiosity to understand the market and customers, you likely won’t make it at SARAL.
If you already have a job, here’s why you might want to switch to SARAL
At SARAL, we’re building a very particular team that is not for most people. But when it’s for you, you’ll know. Many of our team members came from larger companies or mature startups dealing with poor / diluted engineering culture, bloated middle management, tired of shipping half-baked features with technical debt and bad developer experience. Worst of all, their day to day work rarely moved the needle over a 2 year horizon for the company.
At Saral, your work has real impact - each engineer is expected to move the needle and have tangible impact on the product & company. Here are some specific things that SARALians love over their previous employers:
- Autonomy & No Micromanagement: Why would we micromanage the same folks we trust and hire to get the job done? We work with people who can own and drive their work end to end. There is no top-down micromanagement.
- No Bullshit Meetings: We have a daily 30m stand up for engineering - that’s it! We leverage async communication on slack & have a very strong low-meeting culture.
- Remote first: We’re remote-first company and embrace that culture, with employees from 3 different continents.
- Ambitious: If you’re ambitious and deliver great work, we’ll make you a millionaire in 5 years. We offer a solid ESOP package that would align with your financial goals.
- No DSA questions: We believe engineering goes beyond memorizing DSA and rote learning / churning Leetcode. We don’t ask these during our interview process!
- Offsites: We don’t have pool tables or an office. However, we take a company-wide offsite 1-2x per year and have self-improvement allowances like a fitness and book allowance.
- Always Lean: We plan to remain a company of less than 50 people even after revenue grows. SARAL will never be bureaucratic and clunky. Right now we’re a team of 15, across all departments.
Looking for the following traits
- Engineering Excellence: You’re expected to raise the bar — not settle or adjust. Treat engineering as a craft and be proud of YOUR work at Saral. Quality and excellence count in everything we do, and it shows.
- Good to work with: You spend more waking hours with your teammates than anyone else. Others enjoy working with you because of your positive attitude and technical competence
- Collaboration: You effectively collaborate with other engineers, product managers, design team and executives to clarify product requirements and maintain visibility on projects.
- Customer Obsession: You put customers first and recognize that we only succeed when they succeed. You care about how customers feel when they use our product and not just about the technology.
- Hard Work: You are self-motivated, proactive, positive, and dedicated. You don’t shy away from working 10 hours each day.
- Business and customer acumen: You have a deep understanding of the link between the products we build and the revenue they generate (both directly and indirectly).
Responsibilities
As our Backend Engineer, you will build best-in-class features.
You will report directly to the Head of Engineering and work with leadership to create a long-term technical vision for SARAL.
- Own Foundational Features: You would be responsible for shipping core features ( we call them “Rocks” ) that directly impact customers. You will drive and contribute right from:
Research → POC → Designing Scalable Architecture → DB → Backend → Frontend ( optional, but prefered ) → Beta testing → Releasing to all customers → Bug fixed if any
- Shipping Improvements: Alongside “Rocks”, we ship smaller features and improvements every sprint — you’ll be responsible for delivering them.
- Review and Debug Code: You will review your peer’s PRs. Help debug and solve production bugs, failing APIs or queries.
- Improve Performance and Reliability: Part of your work would involve paying off the tech debt, improving performance, optimising older code and make SARAL more reliable for our customers.
- Optimizing Database Architecture & Queries: Some of our legacy tables and queries aren’t well-structured — you’ll help clean that up and improve performance.
- Improving Infrastructure: We are improving our infrastructure and making it more reliable and you’ll play a key role in driving that shift.
- Cost Optimization: As a bootstrapped company, every dollar counts. You’ll be expected to identify and implement cost-saving opportunities across our stack.
Requirements
- You have an extensive background in software engineering with at least 5 years of experience in a backend engineer role (or equivalent) role.
- You have a proven technical pedigree for building and scaling complex architectures and ecosystems for high-growth companies.
- Solid Typescript, MongoDB, Postgres, and NodeJS skills.
- We primarily use AWS and you have experience working with EC2, ECS, S3, Lambda, SQS
- Experience with CI/CD and DevOps beyond just copy pasting pipelines from other repos / internal projects
- You have clear architectural skills around memory management, security, event management, distributed systems, and other key architectural concepts.
- Experience with caching strategies and implementation
- Strong understanding of SQL and database optimization — you’ve written complex queries beyond just SELECT, UPDATE, and DELETE, and know how to analyze and improve performance
- Experience in designing, developing, and maintaining RESTful APIs
SARAL from others’ lenses:
Don’t take our word for how awesome we are. You should check:
Our Core Values
Before joining a company, you must know what we value and how we operate. We look for and nurture these values in every member on our team.
- Customer Obsession: We're focused on our customer's unmet needs, their anxieties, and frustrations when it comes to influencer marketing. We build products that help alleviate these. We go above and beyond for our customers during onboarding and support. When they win, we win.
- Self-Agency: We take ownership of problems. Did the customer make a mistake? It's on us to fix. Someone on the team messes things up? It's upon us to pick things back up. Competitor launches smear campaign? We continue focusing on our game.
- Bias for action: We do things quickly—not at the end of the week, but today. We hotfix minor bugs for customers, even if they don't need them immediately. We take action on suggested improvements as soon as possible. We do not wait for approvals or meetings for easily reversible decisions. We take action.
- Systems Thinking: Fix the system, not the problem. We break problems down to first principles and figure out ways to make an order of magnitude better solution to them. We ask: How can we make something 10x faster, 10x cheaper, or 10x more impactful to our customers? Then we do that.
If you resonate with these, then we must talk!
