Lead Software Engineer

Role overview

Lead Software Engineer at KEKA TECHNOLOGIES

THE ROLE This is a hands-on individual contributor role.

You will be one of the strongest hands-on contributors on the squad, not just a reviewer of other people’s work.

Responsibilities

• You will be the technical anchor of a single squad — the engineer your team turns to for the hardest problems in your domain.
• Write production code every sprint.
• Design for the growth ahead — anticipating higher load and larger data volumes so your squad’s services stay fast and predictable as usage scales.

Required qualifications

• Backend Engineering — Strong hands-on skills in at least one modern backend language and framework, with solid grounding in clean code, testing, and refactoring.
• Data & Storage — Practical experience with relational databases plus at least one NoSQL or caching layer.

Employment details

• Location: Hyderabad [TG] [India]

Application details

• Strong computer science fundamentals — data structures, algorithms, concurrency, and databases — applied as everyday working tools rather than interview trivia.

About the employer

• ABOUT KEKA Keka HR is redefining how businesses across the globe manage their most valuable asset — their people.

Additional role details

• With over 10,000 companies trusting our platform and a product that has earned one of the highest customer satisfaction scores in the HR technology space, we are at an inflection point.
• We need engineers who don’t just write code — they architect the future.
• As a Lead Software Engineer at Keka, you won’t be joining a company — you’ll be shaping one.
• This is a rare opportunity to operate at the intersection of deep technical complexity and massive business impact.
• WHY KEKA Greenfield at Scale — Build and own foundational systems from the ground up — multi-tenant architecture, distributed workflows, real-time event-driven pipelines — while serving millions of end-users across global enterprises.
• Technical Depth, Not Just Breadth — You’ll tackle problems that demand mastery of distributed systems theory, not just framework knowledge.
• Think consensus protocols, CQRS at scale, eventually consistent data models, and zero-downtime migrations across continents.
• Founder-Led, Engineer-First Culture — Keka was built by engineers who believe great software changes industries.
• Technical excellence isn’t a talking point here — it’s how decisions are made.
• You’ll have direct access to leadership and the mandate to drive architectural decisions.
• Hyper-Growth with Enterprise DNA — We combine the speed and ambition of a high-growth startup with the engineering rigour required to serve Fortune 500 companies.
• You get the best of both worlds — move fast and build things that last.
• Impact at a Category-Defining Moment — Keka is building the operating system for the modern workforce.
• The systems you architect today will underpin how millions of people experience work.
• This is a once-in-a-career platform play.
• You lead through design, code, and mentorship, not through reporting lines.
• There are no direct reports attached to this role.
• Your scope is your squad and the systems it owns.
• You go deep rather than wide, and you are measured by what your squad ships and how well it runs in production.
• WHAT YOU WILL OWN Own the technical design for your squad’s services — translating product requirements into clear, well-structured designs your team can build with confidence.
• Build and maintain the APIs, data models, and background workflows your squad owns — keeping them clean, well-documented, and easy for neighbouring teams to consume.
• Own production quality end to end: instrument what matters, respond to incidents, run root-cause analyses, and close the loop with fixes that hold.
• Raise the engineering bar inside your squad — code review standards, test coverage, deployment hygiene, and a healthy CI/CD pipeline.
• Mentor engineers through pairing, design discussions, and thoughtful code reviews — growing their skills without owning their performance reviews.
• Partner closely with your Product Manager and Designer to shape scope, surface technical risk early, and make pragmatic trade-offs between speed and long-term maintainability.
• Represent your squad in cross-team discussions — agreeing on shared contracts, dependencies, and integration points with adjacent squads.
• Reduce technical debt deliberately — knowing when to refactor, when to rewrite, and when to leave it alone.
• TECHNICAL COMPETENCIES REQUIRED System Design — Able to break a feature down into well-structured services and modules, and reason clearly about trade-offs between simplicity, performance, and maintainability.
• Comfortable with schema design, query optimisation, and safe data migrations.
• Asynchronous Processing — Experience with queues, background jobs, or messaging systems (Kafka, RabbitMQ, SQS or similar) for work that runs outside the request cycle.
• APIs & Integration — Experience designing, versioning, and maintaining REST APIs that other teams or customers depend on.
• Reliability & Performance — Comfortable with logging, metrics, and alerting.
• Able to diagnose slow endpoints, memory issues, and production bugs without hand-holding.
• Cloud & Deployment — Working knowledge of cloud services, containers, and CI/CD pipelines — enough to ship and operate your own services.
• Security & Data Handling — Sound grasp of authentication, authorisation, and the careful handling of customer data in a multi-tenant product.
• Technical Communication — Able to write a clear design document, run a design review, and bring a squad to a decision.
• QUALIFICATIONS 5–8 years of professional experience building and running production software used by real customers.
• Experience owning a service or module end to end — design, build, ship, monitor, and improve.
• Comfortable working across more than one language or stack.
• You pick the right tool for the problem rather than defending a favourite.
• A track record of shipping — you have taken features from a rough idea to production and lived with the results.
• Experience working in an agile squad alongside Product and Design, with a healthy respect for delivery timelines.
• B.Tech / M.Tech / MS in Computer Science, or equivalent depth built through years of hands-on system-building.
• WHAT SETS YOU APART Blended experience across hyper-growth startups and enterprise-grade companies — you understand the urgency and resourcefulness of a startup as well as the discipline and process rigour of a large-scale enterprise.
• Experience with multi-tenant SaaS products, particularly in regulated domains like HR, fintech, or healthcare.
• Exposure to event-driven or high-throughput systems, and the instincts that come from operating them.
• You have mentored engineers and visibly made the people around you better.
• Open-source contributions, technical writing, or talks at meetups and conferences.
• JOIN US The best engineers don’t just look for a job — they look for a problem worth solving and a team capable of solving it.
• At Keka, you’ll find both.
• We are building the infrastructure that will power how the modern workforce operates, and we need people who care as much about how a system runs a year from now as about how it ships this sprint.
• If you want real ownership of real systems, a squad that ships, and the room to grow into the engineer you’re trying to become — we want to talk to you.