Founding Engineer, Backend

Scalio is building an AI marketing team for millions of small businesses. We’re looking for people who take ownership, build thoughtfully, and turn their work into measurable customer outcomes.

Founding Engineer, Backend

Scalio | Bengaluru, India | On-site | Full-time

Compensation: ₹30–60 LPA annual fixed salary plus equity. Equity terms discussed during hiring.

The role

Own foundational backend systems for Scalio’s AI marketing product. Work closely with the founders to turn ambiguous product needs into reliable services, make architectural decisions, and establish engineering practices that help a small team ship quickly.

What you’ll work on

• APIs, data models, asynchronous jobs, and integrations supporting marketing workflows.
• Reliable orchestration of generation jobs and external services.
• Authentication, access control, usage tracking, and billing integrations.
• Performance, observability, incident diagnosis, and operational tooling.
• Architecture and implementation from early design through production.

What we’re looking for

• 4+ years of software engineering experience and strong backend fundamentals.
• Evidence of independently building and operating production systems.
• Practical experience with relational databases, queues, retries, and concurrency.
• Sound judgment about reliability, delivery speed, and architectural complexity.
• Clear communication and comfort working directly with founders.

Strong plus

Early-stage startup ownership, AI product infrastructure, payments integrations, cloud operations, and effective use of AI coding tools.

Required written questions

1. Describe a backend you built from an early stage into production. What did you personally own, what scale did it reach, and which architectural decision mattered most?

2. Share a repository, product, technical article, or other relevant work. Which parts did you build?

3. How would you design a generation workflow that may take several minutes and calls an unreliable external provider? Cover job state, retries, duplicate requests, and recovery.

4. Describe a production incident you personally resolved. How did you find the cause and prevent recurrence?

5. Give an example of an ambiguous requirement you turned into a shipped system. What tradeoffs did you make?

6. Describe a decision where you deliberately chose a simpler architecture. What did you defer, and what would trigger a redesign?

Application — all six answers required

Apply through our Google application form: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSft_tSA5YnlqrgLbnvKP8RKwg-E1AJyB6GNYdflBF8zYPfRKA/viewform?usp=header

Provide your name, email, phone number including country code, résumé/CV link, relevant experience, availability to work full-time on-site in Bengaluru, and answers to all six questions above. Include relevant links and clearly explain your personal contribution. Use concrete examples; generic answers will not stand out. Please omit confidential employer or customer information.

We care more about demonstrated work and results than degrees, company names, or familiarity with every tool.