Senior Software Engineer I/II - Backend (Python)

Role overview

Senior Software Engineer I/II - Backend (Python) at UrbanPiper

Employment details

• Location: Bengaluru [KA] [India]

About the employer

• Close to 30 million restaurant orders a month run through UrbanPiper.
• We sit between thousands of restaurant kitchens and everywhere they sell: Swiggy, Zomato, their own storefronts, the POS at the counter.
• When we get it wrong, a restaurant stops selling.
• When we get it right, nobody notices.
• That's the job.
• About the Team A restaurant's menu is its storefront, and it lives in a dozen places at once.
• Change one price, one add-on, one opening hour, and it has to land correctly on every aggregator, each with its own schema, its own rate limits and its own ways of failing silently.
• Now do that for thousands of brands, hundreds of times a day at peak.
• The Menu team owns that pipeline: ingestion, publishing, and knowing exactly what went where when something breaks.
• The hard parts are : data modelling, idempotent sync, async processing at scale, and partners who change their APIs without telling you.
• How we work Small team, large surface area.
• We use AI as a force multiplier & not just to speed up coding.
• We expect you to work effectively with AI agents, exercise sound engineering judgment, and take ownership of what ships.
• Not every problem comes with a clear spec or an obvious solution; we expect you to iterate, challenge your assumptions, and find the best solution to the problem.
• What you'll do Ship to production in your first week.
• Then keep shipping.
• Take a merchant's "my prices are wrong on Zomato" from Support, find the cause in the logs and the data, and make sure it can't happen again.
• Design async pipelines that survive retries, partial failures and rate limits (Kafka, RabbitMQ, SQS, Temporal).
• Model messy catalogue data so that each new aggregator's quirks stay out of the core.
• Build the validation loops that make AI-written code safe to ship: tests, replays against real production payloads, staging checks.
• Instrument your services well enough that you find the bug before the merchant does.
• Review code, write design docs, and go on call for what you built.
• You'll fit if You're AI-native.
• You run AI coding agents (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor or similar) every day, and not as ask-and-hope.
• You think before you prompt, give the agent the right context, and close every loop with a check.
• You have opinions on models, tools, plugins and skills, and you can defend them.
• You take responsibility for what ships, regardless of who wrote it.
• AI makes mistakes; you know where, and you catch them before production does.
• You own the code whether you typed it or not.
• You've built Python backends that run in production at meaningful scale.
• Django or FastAPI (we run both), REST and GraphQL APIs with versioning, pagination and error contracts.
• You know your fundamentals.
• Data structures, testing, SQL you can index and read a query plan, and the ways async systems fail.
• You write clearly.
• A PR description or incident note from you explains the trade-off.
• You've owned something.
• A service in production, a design across teams, engineers who got better working with you.
• Good to have You have built your own AI tooling: agent skills, MCP servers, hooks, eval sets, or automations that run without you.
• Hands-on experience with Kubernetes, Helm, and GitOps with ArgoCD.
• Catalogue, e-commerce, or third-party marketplace integrations.
• Durable workflow engines such as Temporal.
• Experience at a fast-paced startup.
• Your first 6 months Week 1: ship your first PR to Prod!
• You set up your environment and AI tooling yourself, from the code and the docs.
• Month 1: you take a real customer escalation, root-cause it from logs and data, and ship the permanent fix.
• You're on the on-call rotation.
• Month 3: a part of the menu pipeline is yours, end to end.
• Something you shipped is used daily by partners or Support, with alerts and dashboards you built.
• Month 6: you own a number, such as publish failure rate or ingestion time, and you've moved it.
• You've led a design across services, contributed to next quarter's roadmap for your area, and built tooling that makes the rest of the team faster.