Sr. Python Engineer

ABOUT THE ROLE

We are looking for a Senior Python Engineer who brings depth in system design, API architecture, and backend delivery - combined with the ability to lead a small engineering team.

This is a hands-on technical role with direct ownership: you will design systems, ship production-grade features, and grow the engineers around you.

You will work closely with the Product and Tech Lead to define solutions end-to-end, from architecture to deployment.

WHAT YOU WILL OWN :

1. System & API Design :

• Lead the design of scalable backend systems and RESTful API contracts across product modules.
• Define data models, service boundaries, and integration patterns that support long-term product growth.
• Review and approve architecture decisions for features owned by your team.
• Establish and enforce API design standards: versioning, error handling, pagination, rate limiting, and documentation (OpenAPI / Swagger).

2. Feature Delivery :

• Take end-to-end ownership of features - from requirement breakdown and solutioning through build, QA, and production deployment.
• Deliver - 85% of committed features on schedule across sprints with well-tested, production-ready code.
• Break down large features into independently shippable tasks with clear acceptance criteria.
• Proactively identify and communicate risks, dependencies, and blockers before they impact timelines.

3. Technical Execution :

• Build high-quality Python services, APIs, and background workers using FastAPI, Django REST Framework, or equivalent.
• Design and optimize relational and non-relational data stores (PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis) for performance and reliability.
• Integrate message queues and event-driven patterns using RabbitMQ, Kafka, or Celery for async workloads.
• Write clean, testable, and well-documented code with unit and integration test coverage - 80%.
• Deploy and maintain services on cloud platforms (AWS / GCP / Azure) using Docker and CI/CD pipelines.

4. Team Handling & Mentorship :

• Lead a small team of 2-4 engineers: assign tasks, conduct code reviews, and maintain sprint velocity.
• Mentor junior and mid-level engineers through pair programming, design reviews, and 1:1 feedback sessions.
• Create a culture of quality: enforce coding standards, review gates, and shared engineering practices.
• Participate in hiring: conduct technical interviews and evaluate candidates for the engineering team.

5. Stakeholder Communication :

• Provide weekly written updates on feature progress, risks, and technical decisions to the Tech Lead and PM.
• Translate complex technical constraints into clear, non-technical language for product and business stakeholders.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams (Frontend, QA, DevOps, Data) to ensure seamless delivery.

6. Engineering Operations :

• Own CI/CD pipeline health and deployment reliability for services under your domain.
• Maintain a tracked technical debt backlog and resolve at least 20% per quarter.
• Set up and monitor observability: logging, alerting, dashboards (Grafana, CloudWatch, Datadog).

KEY PERFORMANCE INDICATORS (KPIS) :

• Deliver 90% of sprint-committed features on time, with a - 90% rolling quarterly average.
• API designs to require 1 structural rework comment per sprint after Tech Lead sign-off.
• Zero P1 bugs and no more than 2 P2 bugs per sprint traced to owned services.
• Maintain 80% unit and branch test coverage on all new and modified code, enforced as a CI gate.
• Keep sprint delivery variance within 10% and grow team throughput by at least 10% quarter-on-quarter.
• Resolve production incidents in owned services within 4 hours (MTTR), with every incident closed by a post-mortem.
• Enable junior engineers to complete 70% of assigned tasks independently within 3 months of onboarding.
• Achieve an average stakeholder satisfaction score of 4.0/5 in the quarterly 360- feedback survey.
• Close at least 20% of logged technical debt items per quarter from a maintained backlog.
• Ship 100% of new APIs with a complete OpenAPI spec, inline docstrings, and runbook entry at the time of deployment.

REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS :

• 4 to 7 years of professional software engineering experience with Python as the primary language.
• Demonstrable experience designing and building production-grade REST APIs and backend services at scale.
• Strong grasp of system design fundamentals: distributed systems, caching strategies, database design, and service decomposition.
• Hands-on experience leading a small engineering team or acting as a technical lead on a product module.
• Proficiency with relational databases (PostgreSQL / MySQL) and query optimisation.
• Experience with asynchronous and event-driven architectures (Celery, RabbitMQ, Kafka, or Redis Streams).
• Practical knowledge of containerisation and deployment : Docker, Kubernetes, and cloud platforms (AWS / GCP / Azure).
• Familiarity with CI/CD tooling (GitHub Actions, Jenkins) and Git branching strategies.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills; comfortable presenting technical decisions to non-technical audiences.
• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.

PREFERRED / NICE-TO-HAVE :

• Experience with GraphQL API design alongside REST.
• Background in data-intensive applications, analytics pipelines, or machine learning model serving (scikit-learn, FastAPI + ML).
• Familiarity with observability stacks: ELK, Grafana + Prometheus, New Relic.
• Contributions to open-source projects or public technical writing (blogs, talks, papers).
• Experience in IoT, connected-device platforms, or real-time data products.

CORE TECH STACK :

• Language : Python 3.10+
• Frameworks : FastAPI, Django REST Framework, Flask
• Databases : PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis
• Messaging : RabbitMQ, Kafka, Celery
• Cloud : AWS (EC2, RDS, S3, Lambda) / GCP / Azure
• Containers : Docker, Kubernetes, Docker Compose
• Observability : Grafana, CloudWatch, Datadog, ELK Stack
• Testing : pytest, unittest, coverage.py, Postman / Newman
• Docs & Design : OpenAPI / Swagger, draw.io, Confluence