Backend Engineering Lead / Staff

About Lokal

In 2018, we began with a WhatsApp group with a simple hypothesis: people in tier-2/3 towns weren’t really using the internet meaningfully yet. We believed that if we started with local content in their own language, they’d come back every day; once there was a habit and trust, that same space could naturally grow into classifieds and, eventually, something they used for almost everything online.This spark became Lokal. Our first instinct was to put everything in one place & one app - local updates, classifieds, jobs, matrimony and more. It worked, till it stopped working. Users gave us the insight - when one use case outweighs the others, everything else seems like noise. We listened. Like how Craigslist quietly seeded a generation of focused companies & marketplaces, we began unbundling and verticalising.

Today, Lokal is a house of focused apps, many products, one mission:

To connect Tier-2/3+ India to the Knowledge, opportunities, tools and experts they’ve always deserved.We now operate dozens of live apps across categories like:

• Edutainment & Skill Learning – practical skills and learning in regional languages (GyanTV)
• Matrimonial Matchmaking – hyperlocal, compatibility-first partner search (Lokal Matrimony)
• Agri Consulting – farmer-first advisory in local languages (AgriLokal)
• Local Jobs – blue- and grey-collar opportunities close to home (Lokal Jobs, Sahi Jobs)
• Social & Community – Place to find & post social updates (Lokal app)
• Emotional Well-being & Peer Support – safe spaces to talk and feel heard (Dostt & Eaze)
• Astrology & Guidance – instant access to trusted Astrologers via chat and voice (AstroLokal)
• Advisory Services – early bets in legal help, financial guidance, career counselling, and more

• Under the hood, Lokal is a discovery and access platform: local-language internet + deep Bharat insight+ AI. When someone opens a product we’ve built, they don’t wade through clutter; they get a straight line to what they came for.This is the story new teammates walk into:
  A company that started as a whatsapp group, became a family of focused apps, and kept one belief at the centre — access changes lives.We ship fast. We learn fast. We build for Bharat.We are backed by leading global and domestic investors including Y Combinator, Sony, Global Brain, India Quotient, and 3one4 Capital
  About the Role
  We are looking for a Staff Engineer to serve as the technical backbone across our multi-product, multi-pod engineering organisation. This is not a people-management role — it is a high-leverage individual contributor and craft leadership role. You will be the engineering conscience of the organisation: raising the bar on design, code quality, and technical thinking across every pod without owning any single one. Each pod operates autonomously with 2–7 backend engineers and 1-3 senior engineers (3–5 years of experience). Your job is to make those senior engineers — and the teams around them — meaningfully better: sharpening their design instincts, challenging their assumptions, and helping them make smarter trade-offs.
  The Kind of Engineer Who Will Fit the Role
  You care more about making the team better than being the smartest person in the room. You write feedback that is honest but never unkind. You can hold a nuanced conversation about product trade-offs, not just technical ones. You are energised by context-switching across domains rather than drained by it. You believe that the highest form of engineering craft is not the code you write, but the judgment you help others develop.
  What You Will Do
• Technical Mentorship & Design Review
• Review architecture and design documents across pods, providing clear, actionable feedback that not only corrects but also enables learning.
• Conduct in-depth PR reviews for critical changes, focusing on correctness, maintainability, and long-term scalability—not just code style.
• Collaborate 1:1 with senior engineers across pods to strengthen their technical intuition, including system design, trade-off analysis, and decision-making.
• Lead internal design reviews, RFC discussions, and post-mortems to foster a strong culture of continuous learning and improvement.
  Cross-Product Technical Coherence
• Maintain a working understanding of all products and their underlying systems — enough to
• spot duplication, surface re-use opportunities, and flag systemic risks.
• Identify and advocate for shared infrastructure, common patterns, and platform investments
• that multiply the productivity of all pods.
• Serve as the go-to escalation point for hard technical problems across the organisation.
  
  Engineering Quality & Standards
• Define and evolve engineering standards: code quality, documentation, testing philosophy, observability, and API design.
• Own and curate the internal engineering handbook — turning tribal knowledge into durable institutional practice.
• Champion operational excellence: reliability, performance budgets, scalability thinking, and incident learning.
  
  Product & Prioritisation Thinking
• Partner with pod engineers and product stakeholders to help scope, estimate, and sequence technical work with a focus on delivering real product value.
• Challenge teams to think critically about build vs. buy, MVP scope, and long-term architectural implications of near-term decisions.
• Bridge the gap between engineering effort and product outcomes — helping teams ask the right questions before writing a line of code.
  

Must-Have Experience

• 8+ years of software engineering experience, including several years at a Senior or Staff level within a product engineering environment.
• Proven ability to elevate the technical quality and productivity of engineering teams—not just individual contribution to product delivery.
• Strong backend engineering expertise, including system design, distributed systems, databases, performance, and reliability.
• Excellent written communication skills, with a track record of producing clear, structured, and constructive design reviews and RFC feedback.
• Ability to manage and maintain context across multiple products simultaneously, while still going deep when needed.
  

Good to Have

• Experience working in a pod/squad model with distributed ownership and high team autonomy.
• Exposure to early-stage or growth-stage startups, where engineering decisions significantly influence product direction.
• Familiarity with the end-to-end product development lifecycle, including ideation, scoping, execution, and iteration.
• Experience in setting up or improving engineering practices such as RFC processes, on-call runbooks, and incident response frameworks.