Backend / Platform Lead

Backend / Platform Lead

• The opportunityAliens Tattoo is the most recognised name in premium tattooing in India — a ₹45 Cr brand with a credible line of sight to ₹500 Cr by 2030, built across a premium studio network scaling to 100 locations, India's largest tattoo school, and a growing home-service business.

A business growing this fast runs on technology. We build our own products — for sales, customer relationships, communication, operations, people and learning — and we're bringing them together into one platform that the whole company runs on, every day.

We're looking for the engineer who builds that foundation.

• The mandateYou will own the backend and the platform end to end — architecture, data, cloud infrastructure, integrations, security and reliability. Every product we build will run on what you design, and the business will depend on it every hour of every day.

This is a function to be built, not inherited. You'll set the architecture and the engineering standards, decide what we build and what we buy, and hire and lead the engineers who build alongside you. You'll sit at the table when product decisions are made and have the authority to make the technical calls.

• What you'll be doingDesigning a platform that's simple today and still holds up at ten times the scale — shared services, clean APIs and one source of truth for the company's data.

Running production on cloud infrastructure built for failure, so a server, a zone or a bad release never takes the business down.

Building the pipeline every change goes through — automated tests, staging, gradual rollouts, fast rollback — and backups you've proven you can restore.

Owning the data layer — schemas, performance, data quality and migrations from older tools without losing a record.

Connecting to messaging, payments, telephony and partner services through queues and retries, so no event is ever lost.

Building real-time systems — live updates, notifications and communication features — and knowing when to build them and when to buy them.

Setting the engineering standard — code review, testing, security, and how the team safely uses AI tools.

Turning business needs into clear technical plans, with honest trade-offs on cost, risk and time.

Hiring and growing the team that does all of the above.

• What we're looking forYou've done this before — not studied it, done it. You've owned a production system real people depended on, been the one called when it broke, and fixed it under pressure. You know what breaks when a system grows tenfold, and you've designed for it before it happened.

You are deep on the backend. Relational databases, Node.js with TypeScript (or Python), queues, APIs and a major cloud platform — you don't just use them, you know how they fail.

You are pragmatic to the core. You pick proven tools over fashionable ones, and you can explain why to a non-technical leader — in plain language, with the cost and the risk.

You are hands-on and senior in equal measure. You can design the architecture on Monday and debug a failed release at 9pm on Thursday.

You build teams. You review code carefully, teach as you go, and hire people who raise the bar.

Experience with real-time systems, telephony or voice platforms, payments or offline-first applications is a serious plus.

• What success looks likeNinety days in, core systems run on resilient cloud infrastructure, every product has monitoring and alerts, and we've proven we can restore from backup.

Six months in, our products share one identity and one source of customer data, releases ship every week without drama, and the engineering standards are written down and followed.

Here's the part most candidates get wrong, so we'll be direct. Plenty of engineers can build features. Far fewer can own a system — know it's about to fail before it does, roll back calmly when it does, and make sure it never fails the same way twice. This role needs the second kind. If your instinct when production breaks is to wait for someone else, this isn't your seat.