Software Development Engineer II

About Porter

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.

Role Overview

High-Ownership Engineer | Scalable Systems Builder | Future System Leader

As an SDE-2 at Porter, you are a core builder of production systems at scale. You don’t just ship features — you build durable, reliable components that power millions of real-world transactions.

You are trusted with:

• Owning meaningful system components
• Designing robust solutions to non-trivial problems
• Making engineering trade-offs with business context
• Raising the quality bar of the codebaseThis role is about strong independent ownership with growing system influence.

You are expected to think beyond tasks — toward reliability, scale, performance, and user impact.

Key Responsibilities

Design & Build at Scale

• Design and implement scalable services and modules within large distributed systems.
• Drive Low-Level Design independently and contribute meaningfully to High-Level Design discussions.
• Perform performance analysis and reason about scale, failure modes, and trade-offs.
• Build systems that are reliable, observable, and cost-aware.
• Write code that stands the test of time — modular, extensible, production-ready.This is not feature execution — this is system construction.

Own Critical Components

• Own services or subsystems end-to-end — from design to production to operational excellence.
• Be accountable for uptime, performance, and maintainability of owned systems.
• Actively improve monitoring, alerting, and operational hygiene.
• Lead root cause analysis and implement preventive fixes.
• Ownership here means technical accountability, not task completion.

Engineering Excellence

• Apply strong fundamentals in data structures, algorithms, and system design.
• Leverage AI tools to accelerate development while validating outputs rigorously.
• Anticipate edge cases and design for real-world chaos (load spikes, partial failures, latency constraints).
• Raise the quality bar in code reviews and engineering discussions.

Business & Product Impact

• Understand how your systems affect driver experience, customer reliability, and cost efficiency.
• Make trade-offs that balance speed, reliability, and frugality.
• Use metrics to evaluate the success of your systems.You are not just solving engineering problems — you are solving business problems through engineering.

Team Impact

• Influence code quality standards within your pod.
• Collaborate effectively with Product, Data, and Operations.
• Proactively surface risks and suggest improvements.
• You are a pillar of your pod’s execution strength.

What We're Looking For

Experience

• 2–5 years of software development experience.
• Experience shipping production systems.
• Exposure to distributed systems or backend services at scale.
• Experience working in fast-paced, high-ownership environments (startups or scale-ups preferred).Technical Skills
• Strong fundamentals in data structures, algorithms, and object-oriented design.
• Familiarity with modern backend stacks, distributed systems, and cloud infrastructure.
• Strong understanding of engineering operations: monitoring, alerting, reliability, and performance tuning.AI & First-Principles Thinking
• Ability to use AI as a productivity tool, not a crutch.
• Strong judgment to validate AI-generated outputs and reason independently.
• Comfortable breaking down complex problems to fundamentals rather than pattern-matching solutions.Leadership & Mindset
• Strong sense of ownership and accountability (Own It).
• User-first thinking with an understanding of business impact (User Obsession).
• Bias for action and execution in ambiguous situations (Keep Moving).
• Collaborative, empathetic, and resilient under pressure.
• Desire to raise the bar for talent, quality, and execution.Why Join Porter?
• Build systems that operate at massive real-world scale.
• Solve unique logistics and operational challenges.
• Work in a culture that values ownership, frugality, speed, and impact.
• Significant scope to grow beyond SDE 2 into technical or leadership paths.

By applying for this position, I voluntarily consent to submitting my information and documents (collectively “Personal Data”), and hereby consent to SmartShift Logistics Solutions Private Limited and its affiliates, subsidiaries or group companies (collectively “Company”) collecting, using, processing and storing such information and documents for the purposes of evaluating my application and candidature, in accordance with the Company’s policies and applicable law. I further consent to the Company sharing my Personal Data with third parties, including to its affiliates, subsidiaries and vendors for the aforementioned purposes and to the consequential use, processing and storage of my Personal Data by such third parties. I further understand that my Personal Data will be stored for such periods as may be required for the Company, subject to applicable law.