Senior Backend Engineer

Senior Backend Engineer- SDE III

5-8 years of work experience

We at Setu are looking for those who share our core belief - "Every Day is Game Day". We bring our best selves to work each day to realize our mission of enriching the world through the power of digital commerce and financial services.

Role Purpose:

We are a small, diverse, agile and high-performance engineering team. To accelerate our and our partner's efforts we need more people who can help us—become better through peer learning, build new products and tools creatively, take ownership of things to be done and decrease our time to market. A mission-critical role.

What will you do at Setu?

The senior backend engineer owns end-to-end delivery of products/features—and the platform they run on.

Architecting — Design for scale, reliability, and change. Choose the right abstractions, data models, and comms patterns (sync/async/evented). Plan incremental rollout, migrations, and failure domains.

Implementation — Write readable, testable code; enforce patterns that keep the codebase cohesive. Produce docs that work for engineers, business, and external devs. Champion observability, performance budgets, and security-by-default.

Orchestration & Integration — Plug your services cleanly into CI/CD, testing, QA, and infra automation. Partner across teams to ensure your building blocks are easy to extend and operate.

Mentorship — Uplevel people around you via design reviews, pairing, brown-bags, and thoughtful feedback. Be equally open to being mentored—keep the learning flywheel spinning.

Product Thinking — No "throw over the wall." You'll shape scope, UX (for APIs/SDKs), and success metrics. Builders own the product here—minimizing info loss and maximizing accountability.

Operational Excellence — Own what you ship in prod: dashboards, alerts, runbooks, on-call. Drive postmortems to learning, not blame.

Who is the right fit for this role?

• Have shipped and operated distributed systems in production (queues, caches, DB sharding, idempotency, retries, backoffs—the real stuff).
• Are fluent in at least one strongly typed language (Go/Java/Kotlin/Rust) and comfortable across infra tooling (Docker/K8s/Terraform), databases (SQL + NoSQL), and messaging systems.
• Think in systems, measure in data, and communicate with clarity.
• Care about craft, but ship. Care about people, but argue with ideas.

Nice-to-haves (not deal-breakers)

• Experience with payments/fi ntech rails (UPI, AA, BBPS, etc.)
• Public APIs/platforms you've owned
• Security/compliance exposure (PCI, SOC2, RBI audits)

Why Setu?

We will spare no efforts to ensure that Setu empowers you to do the most important and impactful work of your career—

• Opportunity to work closely with the founding team who built and scaled public infrastructure such as UPI, GST, Aadhaar, etc.

We care deeply about your growth. So we work hard to provide you with—

• A fully stocked library and unlimited book budget.
• Tickets to conferences and industry events.
• Learning sessions where we invite both team members and external experts to teach you something new.
• Learning and development allowance that gives access to subscriptions, courses, certifications, music classes, and much more. Grow, learn, and improve with Setu
• Kick-ass benefits include comprehensive health insurance for you and your family, personal accident and term life insurance, access to mental health counsellors, extraordinary coffee, and a beautiful office with lots of solid wood and natural light.
• We work hard to make sure our team is diverse and varied. We interview and hire purely on merit, skill, and competence—everything else is irrelevant.

Our core DNA:

Our culture code—How We Move, defines the behaviours we expect from our people. When you display any of the six culture code elements, you demonstrate 'Every Day is Game Day'. The six elements of our culture code—

• Take the shot:
  You decide fast and deliver right.
• Sign your work like an artist:
  You master what you do and take pride in it.
• Be the Sherpa:
  You lead your crew on every expedition.
• Be the CEO of what you do:
  You own it and make things happen.
• Care with tough love:
  You empower others with trust, respect, and openness.
• Own tomorrow:
  You innovate for the customer and beyond.

Join us if you want to be part of a company that's building infrastructure that will directly impact financial inclusion and improve millions of lives. No cashbacks, no growth-hacks, no gimmicks. Just an audacious mission, and an obsession with craftsmanship in code.