Job location: Gurgaon/Mumbai/Remote
About the role:
Our backend systems process millions of transactions, serve enterprise customers across industries, and must perform flawlessly under pressure. We are scaling fast — and the decisions made at the architecture level today will define how the platform operates for years. We are hiring a Lead Backend Engineer to own that responsibility.
This is a technical leadership role with real weight. You will set the architectural direction for core backend services, resolve ambiguity in complex distributed systems, engage directly with Product and DevOps leadership as a peer, not a downstream implementer and be the person the team turns to when things go wrong in production. Your decisions will have a measurable impact on system reliability, engineering velocity, and the careers of the engineers you mentor.
We are looking for an engineer who has operated at this level before — someone who understands that senior engineering skill and technical leadership are not the same thing, and who is ready to take on both with full ownership.
The key responsibilities of the role will be as follows
- Own backend features end-to-end: requirements, design, implementation, testing, and production rollout
- Produce technical design documents for assigned features; present and defend them in design reviews
- Write production-quality Java and Spring Boot code that meets the team’s standards for performance, maintainability, and test coverage
- Identify and address edge cases, failure modes, and scalability constraints at the design stage — not after the fact
- Deliver features on schedule with a consistent track record of quality and low post-release defect rates
- Build and maintain microservices with a focus on reliability, scalability, and clean service boundaries
- Design and optimise interactions with PostgreSQL and MongoDB; write performant queries and schema migrations
- Implement Kafka-based event-driven workflows: consume, produce, and handle failure scenarios correctly
- Use Elasticsearch for search features; understand indexing, mapping, and query construction
- Instrument services with appropriate logging, metrics, and alerting from day one
- Participate in on-call rotations and respond to production incidents with urgency and structure
- Conduct root cause analysis on incidents related to your features and drive preventive improvements
- Proactively monitor system health; surface degradation or risk to the Lead Engineer before it becomes an incident
- Contribute to operational runbooks, post-mortems, and reliability improvement initiatives
- Conduct thorough, constructive code reviews for junior engineers; elevate review quality on the team
- Mentor junior engineers on technical approach, debugging discipline, and engineering best practices
- Collaborate closely with the Lead Engineer on architecture decisions; contribute well-reasoned technical opinions
- Partner with QA, DevOps, and Product to ensure features are delivered with full operational readiness
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Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent experience.
- 5+ years of experience building and maintaining backend systems in production environments.
- Strong proficiency in Java with hands-on experience in Spring Boot–based microservices.
- Solid understanding of data structures, algorithms, and backend problem solving.
- Strong experience with PostgreSQL or other relational databases in high-scale systems.
- Experience building and consuming RESTful APIs and working with asynchronous systems.
- Strong debugging and troubleshooting skills in live production systems.
- Good understanding of software engineering best practices, including testing, code reviews, CI/CD, and release management.
- Clear communication skills and ability to collaborate effectively within a team.
- Hands-on experience with Kafka or similar messaging/event-streaming platforms.
- Exposure to distributed systems, microservices architecture, and scaling strategies.
- Experience with Docker and Kubernetes in production environments
- Cloud platform experience (AWS, Azure, or GCP)
- Caching with Redis: cache-aside, TTL strategies, cache invalidation patterns
Resilience engineering: Circuit Breaker, Bulkhead, Retry, Rate Limiting patterns
Great to have:
- Experience using Redis, Elasticsearch, and MongoDB in production systems.
- Exposure to SRE or platform engineering practices
- Experience contributing to or leading engineering hiring processes
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Professional growth in a dynamic, rapidly expanding, high-social-impact industry
- An open-minded, collaborative culture made up of enthusiastic colleagues who are driven by the challenge of innovation towards profound impact on people and the planet.
- A truly multicultural experience: you will have the chance to work with and learn from people from different geographies, nationalities, and backgrounds.
- Structured, tailored learning and development programs that help you become a better leader, manager, and professional through the Sun King Center for Leadership.
Sun King is the world’s leading off-grid solar energy company, combining cutting-edge product design, fintech, and field operations to deliver energy access for the 1.8 billion people who live without an affordable and reliable electric-grid connection.
Sun King has built a new kind of energy utility: distributed, green, customer-centric, and affordable. We bring clean, reliable, decentralized energy directly into people’s lives — from solar kits that provide first-time energy access to multi-kilowatt systems that serve both off-grid users and grid-connected customers powering larger homes, schools, hospitals, farms, offices, and light manufacturing.
Already, 25 million homes and businesses rely on Sun King for electricity supply and the appliances and services it enables: lighting, televisions, fans, refrigeration, and smartphones.
Sun King combines energy generation, energy-efficient appliances, installation, and financing into one seamless offering. Think of it as a distributed utility, designed for wherever energy is needed and designed to scale with its users as incomes and energy needs grow.
Sun King makes solar products affordable to low-income households and businesses via ‘pay-as-you-go’ (PAYG) purchase financing. Sun King installs solar after customers pay a small deposit. Customers then make small, manageable payments of as little as US $0.14 a day via mobile money or cash.
Instead of paying for expensive, polluting, and health-damaging kerosene for lighting or diesel for power, customers unlock savings through accessing solar power and after one to two years of payments, customers own their solar equipment outright.
Sun King collects payments digitally through mobile money systems and its 35,000 field agents — over 1 million payments each day. To date, Sun King has extended more than $1.4 billion in PAYG loans to customers.
Sun King began by powering homes and businesses with solar systems delivered through PAYG financing. Now, we’re using the same model to make smartphones and clean cooking equipment affordable: helping households connect to the digital economy and transition from wood-based fuels to modern, sustainable alternatives.
Sun King employs 3,500 full-time staff in 14 countries, with specialties spanning product design, data science, logistics, customer service, sales, software, operations, and more — all with a passion to serve off-grid families. Sun King is committed to gender diversity in the workplace. Women represent 42% of Sun King’s workforce.
