Backend Architect at Weekday AI (YC W21) in Noida, Uttar Pradesh, IN

This role is for one of the Weekday's clients

Salary range: Rs 4000000 - Rs 8000000 (ie INR 40 - 80 LPA)

Min Experience: 7+ years

Location: Noida JobType: full-time

As the Backend Architect, you will act as the Backend Lead with complete end-to-end ownership of all backend systems — from architecture and API design to deployment, reliability, observability, and team leadership. You design and own the scalable backend systems, APIs, and distributed services powering millions of learners across India. This person sets the technical direction for how services are built, deployed, and operated at scale, and owns reliability, performance, and architectural evolution of the backend platform.

Key Responsibilities

• Define and own the backend architecture: service decomposition, inter-service communication, and failure isolation strategies.
• Design high-throughput, low-latency APIs and microservices for learner-facing and internal product features.
• Build event-driven systems using Kafka for async workflows, real-time notifications, and data pipeline integration.
• Own reliability engineering: SLAs, SLOs, circuit breakers, retry strategies, and graceful degradation patterns.
• Lead database selection and design: PostgreSQL, MongoDB or DynamoDB, Redis — trade-off decisions and schema design.
• Establish Kubernetes-based deployment architecture: service mesh, autoscaling, health management, and resource governance.
• Define observability standards: distributed tracing (OpenTelemetry), logging aggregation, alerting (Prometheus, Grafana).
• Drive API design decisions (REST, gRPC, GraphQL) and integration patterns with AI/ML inference services.
• Mentor engineering teams on distributed systems patterns, code quality, and architectural best practices.
• Define and govern DevOps practices and CI/CD pipelines: automated testing, deployment automation, and release reliability.
• Establish test automation and quality assurance standards across backend services: unit, integration, contract, and performance testing.
• Drive integration of multiple systems, platforms, and third-party technologies — including AI/ML inference services and government APIs.
• Guide engineering teams on architecture decisions and drive technical excellence across all backend squads.

Must-Have Skills

• Strong experience in solution architecture, system design, and application development

• Expertise in designing scalable and reliable systems using open-source technology stacks

• Strong understanding of software architecture, design patterns, and best practices

• Experience with DevOps, CI/CD pipelines, and deployment automation

• Knowledge of test automation, quality assurance, and system reliability

• Experience integrating multiple systems, platforms, and technologies

• Strong problem-solving, stakeholder management, and technical leadership skills

• Experience guiding engineering teams and driving architecture decisions

Preferred Skills

• Observability depth: distributed tracing with OpenTelemetry, Grafana stack, SLO-based alerting

• Service mesh: Istio or Linkerd for mTLS, traffic management, and observability at the mesh layer

• Security architecture: OAuth2/OIDC, rate limiting, secrets management (Vault), security hardening

• Cost engineering: FinOps practices, right-sizing compute, reserved capacity management

• AI-enabled backend services: model serving integration, async inference patterns, queue-based ML workflows

Must-have skills

Java, Microservices, System Design

Good-to-have skills

sla, Message Queue, Kafka