Staff Engineer

Overview

We are seeking a Staff Engineer to join the Critical Start Technologies Private Ltd. team, operating under the Critical Start umbrella, for our India operations. As a Staff Software Engineer on the Backend Team, you will technically lead and contribute to the design, development, testing, deployment, maintenance, and enhancement of Cloud Backend Services and Interfaces (including supporting APIs) used by Critical Start customers and employees. In addition to this, you are going to work on distributed systems utilizing the relevant concepts, patterns and practices in your day to day work. You have an keen eye for continuous improvement and actively works on optimizing & streamlining approaches, methods and actual software development, specifically by leveraging GenAI/ Agentic AI.

Critical Start fosters a collaborative environment where teams take full ownership for delivering high-quality solutions and continually strive to improve team performance. We value engineers who bring versatility, demonstrate leadership qualities, excel at working through ambiguity, and show enthusiasm in delivering delightful solutions for end users, while driving technology innovation forward. 

Responsibilities

• Design, Develop, test, and deploy scalable and maintainable microservices and RESTful API interfaces using Python, Celery, Redis, RabbitMQ, that uses PostgreSQL, ElasticSearch and other relational or document databases.
• Design system, services, and develop code based on distributed systems concepts, patterns and industry best practices.
• Strong focus on quality of the code with unit testing and integration testing while developing and enhancing services. Influence the team technically to follow the best practices effectively and ensure it is done.
• Lead and actively participate in collaborative reviews with peers and stakeholders to collectively decide on solution architecture design, drawing on diverse perspectives and expertise.
• Conduct thorough code reviews for fellow engineers, providing constructive feedback to uphold best practices (e.g., accuracy, maintainability, testability, scalability and efficiency) and deliver high-quality results.
• Demonstrate ownership by efficiently triaging, resolving, and identifying the root cause of production issues, while also formulating action plans to prevent or minimize future occurrences and their impact.
• As a technical lead, collaborate and work with teams in India as well as with Global teams.
• Work with Product Management, Architects and other engineering stakeholders to ensure that the requirements are correctly understood as well as implemented to ensure that the developed product or solution brings desired value to customers in the best possible manner.
• In the pursuit of continuous improvements, identify areas and avenues for improving and streamlining productivity of software development and testing by leveraging GenAI/ Agentic AI based approaches and other relevant technologies.
• Take initiative in identifying, ideating and implementing innovative ideas and solutions that leverages technological advancement including AI/ML, Agentic AI for creating competitive & product differentiators. Also, energize & guide the team to drive the innovation forward.
• Work on API versioning, documentation, and testing to ensure robust and reliable API services.
• Contribute to existing documentation or educational content, ensuring it is inclusive and accessible, and adapt it based on product/program updates and user feedback.
• Design and automate required workflows using scripting languages (e.g., Python, Shell).

Qualifications

Required Qualifications:

• Possession of a Bachelor's degree or an equivalent level of practical experience.
• 10+ years of experience in backend development using distributed computing and modern frameworks FastAPI, Celery and also caching technologies such as Redis.
• This is a backend centric role which requires expert level competency in Python, Celery and micro services with a proficiency in RabbitMQ and databases RDBMS - PostgreSQL and ElasticSearch.
• 3+ years of proficiency in designing and developing high performance distributed systems for SaaS platform or products that is capable of handling millions of events per second messages traffic.
• 8+ years of practical experience with data structures and algorithms in an industry setting.
• 3+ years of experience in a technical role leading agile teams, setting technical direction, and building employee engagement.
• 5+ years of experience working in an agile environment within an industry setting.
• 5+ years of proficiency with Git workflow, including pull requests.

Preferred Qualifications:

• 5+ years of expertise in developing high performance low latency distributed cloud services (MSA).
• 3+ years Hands-on experience in managing AWS resources (S3, EC2, ECS, etc.) using Terraform.
• Possession of a Master's degree in Computer Science or a related technical field.