Senior Backend Engineer — Django / Python
Confidential search · Stealth-stage product · Full-time
About this role (and why it's quiet)
We're a small, funded team building a compliance-heavy operations platform for the Tech market. The product is live, has real customers and a real operations team using it every day — but we're not naming it publicly yet, and we're not naming the company in this post.
That means this listing is light on the "what." It is deliberately heavy on the "how," because the how is what determines whether you'll be effective here in week one instead of month three.
We'll share the product, the company, the roadmap, and a codebase walkthrough on the first call, under mutual NDA.
What you'd actually be working on
A large, mature Django monolith — one shared codebase and database, split into ~a dozen internal Django apps, deployed as a web process plus background workers. Concretely, the surface area includes:
· Core web application — Django, server-rendered views, a custom user model with passwordless (email + OTP) auth, and a role-scoped portal pattern where several apps hold no models of their own and instead present tenant-scoped views over one shared data layer.
· Background processing — a substantial Celery + django-celery-beat workload: dozens of scheduled jobs (nightly compliance-data refreshes, expiry and deadline sweeps, automated report emails, queue resets) plus on-demand tasks for bulk generation and imports.
· Browser automation — headless Chrome / Selenium bots that log into external third-party portals that offer no API, scrape structured data, and write changes back. This is genuinely hard, genuinely fragile, and genuinely load-bearing for the business. If this part sounds interesting rather than horrifying, that's a strong signal.
· Integrations — REST clients against internal microservices, public government data APIs, Microsoft Graph (Outlook/Exchange) for automated inbound and outbound mail, Slack, Firebase push, and third-party LLM APIs.
· Real-time — Django Channels + Daphne over ASGI for live chat, with presence and push fallback for offline recipients.
· AI subsystem — an existing module covering document classification and extraction (OCR + LLM), inbound email parsing, a support chat assistant with human escalation, retrieval-style Q&A, routing, and anomaly detection. Currently direct API calls to hosted models; the deeper ML stack is provisioned but not yet wired in.
· Machine-to-machine API — DRF-based endpoints, shared-secret authenticated, consumed by two companion products, including a whitelist-validated generic query endpoint.
· Multi-tenancy and permissions — tenant scoping resolved in middleware with a hand-maintained per-model field map, layered under a designation → menu-permission system enforced by middleware and reflected in templates.
· Auditability — near-universal change history via django-simple-history, and soft deletion rather than hard deletes, throughout.
You will not be building this from scratch. You'll be extending it, hardening it, paying down parts of it, and shipping into it while an operations team depends on it staying up.
What we need you to already have
Non-negotiables:
· 4+ years of production Python, most of it Django. Not Django-adjacent, not a tutorial project. You've owned Django apps in production, run migrations against real data, and debugged things at 11pm.
· Real Celery experience. You know the difference between a task that's idempotent and one that merely looks idempotent, and you've dealt with retries, stuck jobs, and beat schedules that quietly stopped firing.
· PostgreSQL fluency. ORM query tuning, select_related/prefetch_related reflexes, indexing decisions, JSON and array fields, and the ability to read a slow query plan.
· Redis as cache, broker, and channel layer — practical, not theoretical.
· Comfort in a large existing codebase. You can read unfamiliar code, trace a request through middleware you didn't write, and make a surgical change without a rewrite. This matters more to us than any single library on your résumé.
· You ship. Small, reviewable, tested increments against a live system.
Strong pluses:
· Selenium / Playwright / browser-automation experience against hostile or unstable targets.
· Django Channels, ASGI, WebSockets.
· Django REST Framework, and designing internal APIs consumed by other systems.
· Document processing: PyMuPDF, pypdf, pdfminer, Tesseract/OCR, openpyxl, pandas, reportlab.
· Practical LLM integration — prompt design, structured output, confidence thresholds, human-in-the-loop escalation. We care about reliable extraction pipelines, not demos.
· AWS S3 / django-storages, and general "keep a Django deployment healthy" instincts.
· Any prior exposure to provider credentialing, payer enrollment, or regulated back-office workflows. Rare, and a real accelerant.
Honest anti-requirements. This is probably not your role if you:
· Want a greenfield project, or want to migrate the monolith to microservices in your first quarter.
· Need a large team, a dedicated QA function, or fully spec'd tickets to be productive.
· Aren't comfortable working on unglamorous problems: brittle third-party portals, expiry-date arithmetic, exception logs, and long-tail bugs that block real people's work.
How you'd work
· Small team, direct access to the founder and to the operations staff who use the product all day. Short feedback loops, no layers.
· Working hours overlap with a team operating on IST shifts against US business hours. Some flexibility, but overlap is required.
· You'll be trusted with production early. That's the upside and the responsibility.
Compensation & logistics
· Location: Mohali
· Type: Full-time
· Compensation: we'll state a number on the first call, we won't waste your time.
· Equity: Yes
· Incentives: A solid incentive program tied to successful outcomes.
How to apply
Email- [email protected] with:
1. A short note on the most complex existing codebase you've shipped into, and how you got oriented in it.
2. One thing you've built with Celery that broke in production, and what you changed.
3. GitHub / portfolio / anything you can show. Private work is fine — describe it.
Skip the cover letter. Three paragraphs beats three pages.
We reply to everyone who answers the questions. Because this is a confidential search, we'll ask you to sign a mutual NDA before the technical deep-dive; you'll see the actual product and codebase at that stage, not before.
Pay: ₹50,000.00 - ₹80,000.00 per month
Experience:
- Python: 6 years (Required)
- Django: 6 years (Required)
Work Location: In person
