Lead Backend Engineer

Lead Engineer ( Backend )

About Lokal

In 2018, we began with a WhatsApp group with a simple hypothesis: people in tier-2/3 towns weren’t really using the internet meaningfully yet. We believed that if we started with local content in their own language, they’d come back every day; once there was a habit and trust, that same space could naturally grow into classifieds and, eventually, something they used for almost everything online.This spark became Lokal. Our first instinct was to put everything in one place & one app - local updates, classifieds, jobs, matrimony and more. It worked, till it stopped working. Users gave us the insight - when one use case outweighs the others, everything else seems like noise. We listened. Like how Craigslist quietly seeded a generation of focused companies & marketplaces, we began unbundling and verticalising.

Today, Lokal is a house of focused apps, many products, one mission:

To connect Tier-2/3+ India to the Knowledge, opportunities, tools and experts they’ve always deserved.We now operate dozens of live apps across categories like:

• Edutainment & Skill Learning – practical skills and learning in regional languages (GyanTV)
• Matrimonial Matchmaking – hyperlocal, compatibility-first partner search (Lokal Matrimony)
• Agri Consulting – farmer-first advisory in local languages (AgriLokal)
• Local Jobs – blue- and grey-collar opportunities close to home (Lokal Jobs, Sahi Jobs)
• Social & Community – Place to find & post social updates (Lokal app)
• Emotional Well-being & Peer Support – safe spaces to talk and feel heard (Dostt & Eaze)
• Astrology & Guidance – instant access to trusted Astrologers via chat and voice (AstroLokal)
• Advisory Services – early bets in legal help, financial guidance, career counselling, and more

Under the hood, Lokal is a discovery and access platform: local-language internet + deep Bharat insight+ AI. When someone opens a product we’ve built, they don’t wade through clutter; they get a straight line to what they came for.This is the story new teammates walk into:
A company that started as a whatsapp group, became a family of focused apps, and kept one belief at the centre — access changes lives.We ship fast. We learn fast. We build for Bharat.We are backed by leading global and domestic investors including Y Combinator, Sony, Global Brain, India Quotient, and 3one4 Capital

Why Join Us?

We’re scaling fast with strong fundamentals, on a mission to empower millions through AI and access. At Lokal, you’ll take ownership from day one, build for real impact, and help redefine the roadmap of how Bharat connects to opportunities, knowledge, and experts.

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 organisation.

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.

Requirements

• 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.

Strong to Have

• Experience working in a pod or squad model with distributed ownership and a high degree of team autonomy.
• Exposure to early or growth-stage startups where engineering judgment directly shapes product direction.
• Familiarity with the full product development lifecycle: ideation, scoping, execution, and iteration.
• Experience establishing or maturing engineering practices (RFC templates, on-call runbooks, incident response processes).

Experience Level

Senior Level