Porter is building the operating system for intra-city logistics in India. With ~20 million orders per month, 500K+ daily-active drivers, and rapid scale ahead (1.5x growth expected next year), we solve complex real-world problems at massive scale, balancing speed, reliability, and cost efficiency in a highly operational environment.
As an SDE 4 at Porter, you own a domain or platform spanning multiple services and set its technical direction. You’ll architect systems that hold up at Porter scale, influence priorities across teams without authority, and drive quarter-long technical roadmaps mapped to business KPIs. You’ll raise the engineering bar — through design reviews, mentorship of senior and junior engineers, and active participation in hiring — and shape how the team reasons about reliability, cost, and trade-offs.
You think from first principles, use AI as a force multiplier (and help others use it well), and ship systems that are reliable, observable, and economically sustainable at scale.
- Architect and own multi-service systems and platforms handling millions of transactions — reasoning explicitly about service contracts, failure modes across boundaries, and cross-service observability.
- Drive high-level and low-level design across services — including build/buy/defer decisions framed by ROI and contribution-margin.
- Perform capacity planning, back-of-the-envelope calculations, and identify system bottlenecks early — at single-service and cross-service scope.
- Set technical direction for your domain via quarter-long roadmaps mapped to business KPIs; sequence delivery against tech-debt and operational risk.
- Lead engineering operations for your domain: SLIs/SLAs, MTTR/MTTA, automated remediation (auto-retry, throttles, autoscaling guards), zero-downtime migrations, and cost-per-transaction awareness.
- Write clean, maintainable, and testable production-grade code.
- Apply SOLID, design patterns, and modern engineering practices fluently.
- Treat code as mentorship — strong naming, non-obvious comments only, test coverage choices that signal intent, PR-worthy from the first commit.
- Design for extensibility under evolving requirements; preserve interfaces as the system grows through 2–3x changes.
- Use AI to accelerate delivery, validate its outputs critically, and introduce AI workflows that lift the team — not just yourself.
- Own end-to-end delivery — from idea to system design to production to long-term operation — across multiple services and quarters.
- Drive projects with high autonomy, navigate ambiguity by translating fuzzy business asks into sequenced plans with measurable outcomes, and deliver under tight timelines.
- Lead operational reviews, incident management, and system improvements for your domain — own postmortems, drive MTTR/MTTA down, and build the automation that prevents repeats.
- Run time-boxed experiments and DevEx upgrades (faster CI, parallel builds, standardized playbooks) with measurable impact.
- Align teams around shared technical direction — surface integration gaps, organize cross-team forums, and mediate priority conflicts in Porter’s favor.
- Partner deeply with Product, Data, and Business stakeholders; turn fuzzy operational realities into clear technical trade-offs and build/buy/defer decisions.
- Mentor engineers across grades — set clear objectives for those you mentor, give specific, behaviour-based feedback, and surface early performance signals with measured action.
- Raise the bar in hiring — own interview debriefs, calibrate the panel, and contribute to onboarding and interview-loop improvements.
- 7+ years of software development experience (SDE 4 or equivalent senior IC role).
- Proven track record owning and scaling production systems end-to-end — across multiple services/domains and multiple quarters.
- Demonstrated experience setting technical direction for a domain or platform and influencing teams without direct authority (via design reviews, RFCs, shared infra, hiring debriefs).
- Experience working in fast-paced, high-ownership environments (startups or scale-ups preferred).
- Strong fundamentals in data structures, algorithms, and object-oriented design.
- Hands-on experience designing systems at scale — across services/domains, not just within one — with explicit reasoning about contracts, failure modes, and cross-service observability.
- Deep familiarity with modern backend stacks, distributed systems, and cloud infrastructure; comfort making build/buy/defer decisions with ROI framing.
- Strong engineering operations chops: SLIs/SLAs, incident leadership, MTTR/MTTA improvement, capacity planning across services, and cost-per-transaction awareness.
- Use AI as a productivity force multiplier, not a crutch; introduce AI workflows that lift the broader team’s velocity.
- Strong judgment to validate AI-generated outputs, mentor others on when (and when not) to use AI, and reason independently when AI is wrong.
- Reason from first principles on ambiguous business problems and architectural trade-offs at a quarter horizon — not just within a single feature or sprint.
- Strong sense of ownership and accountability that extends to your domain’s health (Own It).
- User-first thinking with deep understanding of business impact — comfortable making build/buy/defer trade-offs with ROI in mind (User Obsession, Business & Product Acumen).
- Bias for action under ambiguity — drive clarification, sequence delivery, and ship under tight timelines (Keep Moving).
- Collaborate across teams without authority — mediate priority conflicts in Porter’s favor, surface integration gaps, and align stakeholders (Collaborate to Win).
- Active in mentorship and hiring — set objectives for those you mentor, give specific behaviour-based feedback, and contribute to hiring debriefs (People & Talent Management).
- Resilient under pressure; raise the bar for talent, quality, and execution across the team — not just your own work.
- Own a domain/platform to build at massive real-world scale — your decisions directly shape millions of orders a month.
- Solve unique logistics and operational challenges at the intersection of physical operations, marketplace dynamics, and consumer experience.
Set technical direction with autonomy — quarter-long roadmaps, build/buy/defer decisions, and architectural calls within your domain are yours to make
