Lead Software Engineer
Posted Updated
ABOUT KEKA
Keka HR is redefining how businesses across the globe manage their most valuable asset — their people. With over 10,000 companies trusting our platform and a product that has earned one of the highest customer satisfaction scores in the HR technology space, we are at an inflection point. We need engineers who don’t just write code — they architect the future.
As a Lead Software Engineer at Keka, you won’t be joining a company — you’ll be shaping one. This is a rare opportunity to operate at the intersection of deep technical complexity and massive business impact.
WHY KEKA
- Greenfield at Scale — Build and own foundational systems from the ground up — multi-tenant architecture, distributed workflows, real-time event-driven pipelines — while serving millions of end-users across global enterprises.
- Technical Depth, Not Just Breadth — You’ll tackle problems that demand mastery of distributed systems theory, not just framework knowledge. Think consensus protocols, CQRS at scale, eventually consistent data models, and zero-downtime migrations across continents.
- Founder-Led, Engineer-First Culture — Keka was built by engineers who believe great software changes industries. Technical excellence isn’t a talking point here — it’s how decisions are made. You’ll have direct access to leadership and the mandate to drive architectural decisions.
- Hyper-Growth with Enterprise DNA — We combine the speed and ambition of a high-growth startup with the engineering rigour required to serve Fortune 500 companies. You get the best of both worlds — move fast and build things that last.
- Impact at a Category-Defining Moment — Keka is building the operating system for the modern workforce. The systems you architect today will underpin how millions of people experience work. This is a once-in-a-career platform play.
THE ROLE
This is a hands-on individual contributor role. You will be the technical anchor of a single squad — the engineer your team turns to for the hardest problems in your domain. You lead through design, code, and mentorship, not through reporting lines. There are no direct reports attached to this role. Your scope is your squad and the systems it owns. You go deep rather than wide, and you are measured by what your squad ships and how well it runs in production.
WHAT YOU WILL OWN
- Own the technical design for your squad’s services — translating product requirements into clear, well-structured designs your team can build with confidence.
- Write production code every sprint. You will be one of the strongest hands-on contributors on the squad, not just a reviewer of other people’s work.
- Build and maintain the APIs, data models, and background workflows your squad owns — keeping them clean, well-documented, and easy for neighbouring teams to consume.
- Design for the growth ahead — anticipating higher load and larger data volumes so your squad’s services stay fast and predictable as usage scales.
- Own production quality end to end: instrument what matters, respond to incidents, run root-cause analyses, and close the loop with fixes that hold.
- Raise the engineering bar inside your squad — code review standards, test coverage, deployment hygiene, and a healthy CI/CD pipeline.
- Mentor engineers through pairing, design discussions, and thoughtful code reviews — growing their skills without owning their performance reviews.
- Partner closely with your Product Manager and Designer to shape scope, surface technical risk early, and make pragmatic trade-offs between speed and long-term maintainability.
- Represent your squad in cross-team discussions — agreeing on shared contracts, dependencies, and integration points with adjacent squads.
- Reduce technical debt deliberately — knowing when to refactor, when to rewrite, and when to leave it alone.
TECHNICAL COMPETENCIES REQUIRED
- System Design — Able to break a feature down into well-structured services and modules, and reason clearly about trade-offs between simplicity, performance, and maintainability.
- Backend Engineering — Strong hands-on skills in at least one modern backend language and framework, with solid grounding in clean code, testing, and refactoring.
- Data & Storage — Practical experience with relational databases plus at least one NoSQL or caching layer. Comfortable with schema design, query optimisation, and safe data migrations.
- Asynchronous Processing — Experience with queues, background jobs, or messaging systems (Kafka, RabbitMQ, SQS or similar) for work that runs outside the request cycle.
- APIs & Integration — Experience designing, versioning, and maintaining REST APIs that other teams or customers depend on.
- Reliability & Performance — Comfortable with logging, metrics, and alerting. Able to diagnose slow endpoints, memory issues, and production bugs without hand-holding.
- Cloud & Deployment — Working knowledge of cloud services, containers, and CI/CD pipelines — enough to ship and operate your own services.
- Security & Data Handling — Sound grasp of authentication, authorisation, and the careful handling of customer data in a multi-tenant product.
- Technical Communication — Able to write a clear design document, run a design review, and bring a squad to a decision.
QUALIFICATIONS
- 5–8 years of professional experience building and running production software used by real customers.
- Experience owning a service or module end to end — design, build, ship, monitor, and improve.
- Strong computer science fundamentals — data structures, algorithms, concurrency, and databases — applied as everyday working tools rather than interview trivia.
- Comfortable working across more than one language or stack. You pick the right tool for the problem rather than defending a favourite.
- A track record of shipping — you have taken features from a rough idea to production and lived with the results.
- Experience working in an agile squad alongside Product and Design, with a healthy respect for delivery timelines.
- B.Tech / M.Tech / MS in Computer Science, or equivalent depth built through years of hands-on system-building.
WHAT SETS YOU APART
- Blended experience across hyper-growth startups and enterprise-grade companies — you understand the urgency and resourcefulness of a startup as well as the discipline and process rigour of a large-scale enterprise.
- Experience with multi-tenant SaaS products, particularly in regulated domains like HR, fintech, or healthcare.
- Exposure to event-driven or high-throughput systems, and the instincts that come from operating them.
- You have mentored engineers and visibly made the people around you better.
- Open-source contributions, technical writing, or talks at meetups and conferences.
JOIN US
The best engineers don’t just look for a job — they look for a problem worth solving and a team capable of solving it. At Keka, you’ll find both. We are building the infrastructure that will power how the modern workforce operates, and we need people who care as much about how a system runs a year from now as about how it ships this sprint. If you want real ownership of real systems, a squad that ships, and the room to grow into the engineer you’re trying to become — we want to talk to you.