Forward Deployed Engineer

Company: Zintlr

Location: Hebbal / Ganganagar, Bengaluru

Work Type: On-site

Experience: 4–5 years

About Zintlr

Zintlr is a B2B sales intelligence platform that helps sales teams understand who they are selling to by combining contact and company data with AI-generated personality and psychographic profiles.

The Role

We’re looking for a hands-on Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) who can take ownership of backend engineering while working closely with product and customer-facing teams to solve complex business and technical challenges. This is an individual contributor role with leadership responsibilities—you will be expected to write production code, make architectural decisions, build tailored solutions and integrations, and lead a small team of engineers.

You should be comfortable working directly with evolving business requirements, translating customer needs into scalable technical solutions, and taking ownership from problem discovery and solution design through development, deployment, and production. The role requires someone who can balance strong engineering fundamentals with customer needs and business priorities in a fast-paced startup environment.

What You’ll Do

1. Backend Engineering & Architecture

• Design, develop, and maintain scalable backend services and REST APIs using Python, Django, and Django REST Framework.
• Own backend architecture and make technical decisions around service design, data models, API contracts, and system performance.
• Design reliable APIs with appropriate authentication, pagination, filtering, versioning, and backward compatibility.
• Work hands-on with MongoDB, Redis, and relational databases, making informed decisions around data modelling, indexing, caching, and query optimisation.
• Build and maintain asynchronous workflows, background jobs, and task queues using Celery or equivalent technologies.
• Integrate third-party APIs and data providers, ensuring robust handling of rate limits, retries, timeouts, and failures.
• Build and extend backend capabilities to support complex use cases, specialised workflows, and evolving requirements across different customer scenarios.
• Identify technical bottlenecks and improve the scalability, maintainability, and reliability of backend systems.2. Production Ownership & Reliability
• Take end-to-end ownership of backend services from development and testing through deployment and production maintenance.
• Diagnose and resolve production issues independently, conduct root-cause analysis, and implement preventive measures.
• Establish and maintain appropriate logging, monitoring, metrics, and alerting for backend services.
• Optimise application performance, including API latency, database queries, resource utilisation, and background job execution.
• Maintain Docker-based development and deployment workflows and contribute to reliable CI/CD pipelines.
• Follow secure coding practices and ensure customer data is handled appropriately.
• Maintain code quality through automated testing, error handling, and appropriate documentation.3. Technical Leadership & Team Ownership
• Lead and mentor a team of 3–4 backend engineers while remaining actively involved in coding and technical execution.
• Break down product requirements into technical tasks, estimate effort, prioritise work, and drive delivery within agreed timelines.
• Review code and technical designs, enforce engineering standards, and ensure the team follows sound development practices.
• Identify technical risks early, resolve blockers, and hold ownership of the quality and reliability of the team's output.
• Help engineers improve through code reviews, technical discussions, and hands-on guidance.
• Participate in technical interviews and support the onboarding of new engineers.4. Product & Business Alignment
• Work closely with product and leadership to translate business requirements into practical, maintainable technical solutions.
• Work closely with product and customer-facing teams to understand specific business requirements, identify gaps in existing capabilities, and translate them into practical technical solutions.
• Develop tailored integrations, workflows, and backend enhancements to address complex requirements, balancing immediate business needs with long-term product scalability and maintainability.
• Take end-to-end ownership of solving ambiguous technical problems, from understanding the underlying requirement and evaluating possible approaches to implementation, deployment, and validation.
• Challenge requirements when necessary and identify simpler approaches that deliver the intended business outcome.
• Evaluate build-versus-buy decisions and weigh engineering effort against business impact, cost, and long-term maintainability.
• Take responsibility for technical trade-offs rather than relying on predefined instructions for every decision.
• Use AI-assisted development tools such as Cursor, Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, or similar tools to improve engineering productivity and code quality.

What We’re Looking For

Must-Have

• 4–5 years of hands-on backend development experience, with strong production experience in Python, Django, and Django REST Framework.
• Demonstrated ability to design, build, deploy, and maintain backend services independently.
• Strong understanding of API design, database modelling, query optimisation, caching, concurrency, and failure-handling patterns.
• Practical experience with MongoDB, Redis, and relational databases.
• Experience building and operating asynchronous workflows using Celery or an equivalent task queue.
• Working knowledge of Docker, CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, and production debugging.
• Experience integrating third-party APIs and building reliable systems around external dependencies.
• Prior experience mentoring engineers, leading technical execution, or owning a backend module or service end to end.
• Ability to make technical decisions independently and take accountability for the results.
• Ability to translate ambiguous business requirements into technical solutions, with experience building custom integrations, tailored workflows, or extending existing product capabilities.

Good to Have

• Experience integrating LLM APIs, such as OpenAI or Anthropic, into product features.
• Familiarity with search and indexing technologies such as Elasticsearch.
• Experience with data pipelines, large-scale data processing, or data-intensive applications.
• Experience with cloud platforms such as AWS, GCP, or Azure.
• Experience working in a B2B SaaS or early-stage startup environment.

How You Work

• Ownership: You take responsibility for outcomes, not just assigned tasks, and follow through until solutions are stable in production.
• Technical judgement: You can explain your design choices, understand trade-offs, and make decisions based on practical constraints.
• Execution: You work independently, prioritise effectively, and deliver without needing constant follow-ups.
• Business thinking: You understand that engineering decisions must support product goals and business outcomes.
• Problem-solving mindset: You can work through unclear or evolving requirements, understand the problem behind the request, and build practical solutions that deliver business value without creating unnecessary technical complexity.
• Continuous learning: You actively learn new tools and technologies and apply them where they create value.
• AI adoption: You use AI-assisted development tools thoughtfully to improve speed without compromising code quality or engineering judgement.

Why Zintlr

• Own meaningful backend systems and contribute directly to product and customer outcomes.
• Work closely with the founders and leadership on technical and product decisions.
• Lead a small engineering team while remaining hands-on with real engineering challenges.
• Work in a fast-moving environment where ownership, sound judgement, and execution matter.