# Tech Lead-Backend

**Company:** [Lokal App](http://jobs.workable.com/companies/2NbDRiTU8do3haEgHLjLGC.md)
**Location:** Bengaluru, India
**Workplace:** on site
**Employment type:** Full-time
**Department:** Engineering

[Apply for this job](http://jobs.workable.com/view/adf0e858-f17a-460b-bd0b-430a0dd64b91)

## Description

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

## Requirements

**Technical Mentorship & Design Review**

• Review architecture and design documents across all pods, providing clear, actionable feedback that teaches as much as it  
corrects.

• Conduct deep-dive PR reviews on high-stakes changes, focusing on correctness, maintainability, and future extensibility —  
not just style.

• Work 1:1 with pod senior engineers to develop their technical intuition: system design, trade-off analysis, and engineering  
judgment.

• Run internal design review sessions, RFC processes, and post-mortems that build a culture of learning.  
  
**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 organization.  
  
**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, with at least few years at a senior or staff level in a product engineering environment.

• Demonstrated track record of improving the technical quality and output of engineering teams — not just shipping product  
yourself.

• Deep backend engineering expertise (system design, distributed systems, databases, performance, reliability).

• Strong written communication: your design doc reviews and RFC feedback are models of clarity and constructive critique.

• Comfort holding context across multiple products simultaneously without losing depth on any one of them.