As a Software Engineer (Backend) at PhonePe, you will play a crucial role in building robust, scalable, and efficient applications that impact millions of users across India. You will be responsible for creating high-performance systems, ensuring seamless user experiences, and contributing to the development of PhonePe's broad range of financial services.

The role involves designing and developing backend systems that cater to complex business needs in the rapidly growing FinTech sector. You will engage in the full lifecycle of product development – from ideation and design to development and deployment – while adhering to high engineering standards.

Detailed Responsibilities

• You will work on designing and implementing the backend of PhonePe's large-scale applications. This involves writing clean, scalable, and maintainable code, ensuring that each module meets performance, security, and reliability requirements.
• Participate in building backend systems that enable various financial services like insurance, lending, mutual funds, and more.
• You will work on high-level design decisions and provide input for platform abstractions and reusable components. You will also contribute to shaping the system architecture that handles millions of requests and large-scale data.
• Involve in making key decisions around the architecture and engineering patterns to ensure scalability and resilience.
• Continuously monitor and tune the performance of large-scale distributed systems. This will include optimizing system performance, ensuring low latency, and maintaining high throughput as user traffic increases.
• Handle massive data sets and ensure the backend can scale seamlessly as the platform grows.
• Work closely with product managers, business analysts, and other engineering teams to define, design, and ship new features and functionalities. You will translate business requirements into technical specifications and lead execution across multiple subsystems.
• Be involved in cross-team collaborations, ensuring that new features and changes align with business objectives and impact users positively.
• Mentor junior engineers, foster team spirit, and contribute to a culture of continuous learning. You will help junior team members navigate through technical challenges, review their code, and encourage best practices.
• Lead or participate in technical discussions, design reviews, and knowledge sharing within the engineering team.
• Embrace and contribute to the culture of continuous improvement by proposing and implementing changes that improve the quality of the system, the development processes, and the overall user experience.
• Stay up to date with industry trends and apply modern tools, frameworks, and methodologies to improve productivity and performance.
• You will take ownership of medium to large projects, ensuring timely delivery and execution. You will break down projects into smaller, manageable phases and track progress to meet deadlines.
• Lead the planning and execution of critical business features, ensuring they align with the overall product roadmap and strategic objectives.
• Design and implement systems with a strong focus on security, privacy, and reliability. Ensure that the backend systems can handle user data securely and that the system can recover from failures without impacting the user experience.

Key Skills & Qualifications

• 4-8 years of experience in backend development, especially for high-scale systems. Experience in the FinTech domain is a plus, but not mandatory.
• Strong hands-on experience with programming languages such as Java, C++, or C (Java preferred), with a deep understanding of the language’s ecosystem and libraries.
• Expertise in multithreading, concurrency, and parallelism, which is critical for developing scalable and high-performance applications.
• Object-Oriented Design (OOD) skills with an understanding of design patterns and SOLID principles.
• Experience with databases (both relational like MySQL, and NoSQL databases such as HBase, Elasticsearch, Aerospike).
• Familiarity with distributed systems, ensuring fault tolerance, high availability, and scalability.
• Knowledge of cloud platforms (e.g., AWS, GCP, Azure) and deployment automation tools (e.g., Kubernetes, Docker).

Problem Solving & System Design

• Excellent problem-solving skills, especially when working on large and complex technical challenges that affect millions of users.
• Ability to architect and design solutions that are efficient, maintainable, and scalable under varying loads.

Collaboration & Communication

• Strong collaboration skills to work effectively with cross-functional teams.
• Ability to articulate complex technical ideas to non-technical stakeholders and provide clarity in team discussions.
• Excellent communication skills for documentation, design proposals, and code reviews.

Quality Assurance & Testing

• Solid understanding of Test-Driven Development (TDD) and writing unit, integration, and end-to-end tests.
• Experience in automated testing tools and frameworks to ensure the quality of your code.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with high-availability systems, financial services, or e-commerce platforms.
• Advanced degrees (M.Tech or Ph.D.) in Computer Science or a related field.
• Prior experience with microservices architecture.
• Knowledge of DevOps practices and CI/CD pipelines.
• Familiarity with performance tuning and profiling tools.

Why PhonePe?

1. High Impact. PhonePe’s vast user base offers the opportunity to work on projects that affect millions of people. Your work will directly contribute to improving the financial inclusion of users across India.
2. Learning & Growth. You’ll work with some of the brightest minds in technology and finance, providing ample opportunities for personal and professional growth.
3. Work-Life Balance. PhonePe emphasizes a healthy work-life balance with competitive benefits and a focus on employee wellness.