Required Skills
About the Job
Setu is seeking a highly motivated Senior Backend Engineer with lead-level ownership to join our Payments Platform (BBPS) engineering team. In this role, you will drive the technical vision and execution for critical components of our BBPS stack, ensuring reliable delivery across numerous partner and bank integrations. You'll translate complex requirements into robust technical designs, guide implementation, and resolve challenging production issues. This is an opportunity for an experienced engineer who thrives in production-heavy environments, navigates ambiguity in external integrations, and balances speed, quality, and operational excellence. We encourage innovation and exploration of AI's potential to enhance our products, workflows, and engineering systems. You will contribute to making our systems more AI-friendly, identifying opportunities to leverage AI for improved developer productivity, debugging, and operational efficiency.
**Key Responsibilities:** * Own and drive backend engineering for core BBPS systems across BOU and COU flows. * Translate product and business requirements into detailed technical plans and designs. * Lead technical discussions on APIs, workflows, data models, and error handling strategies (retries, idempotency, failure recovery). * Build and review production-grade services with a strong emphasis on reliability and maintainability. * Handle complex production incidents, provide deep debugging across various layers (logs, traces, databases), and support escalations. * Collaborate closely with Product, Solutions, Business, and Operations teams. * Mentor junior engineers through code and design reviews. * Enhance system observability and improve operational practices. * Identify and implement AI-native or AI-assisted approaches to improve developer productivity, debugging, and product capabilities. * Design systems with future AI-assisted operations and product use cases in mind.
**What We're Looking For:** * 6-10 years of backend engineering experience with demonstrable ownership of production systems. * Proven experience designing and building scalable, API-heavy distributed systems. * Strong fundamentals in databases, data modeling, and SQL. * Excellent debugging skills across application, infrastructure, and data layers. * Experience working with external integrations, ambiguous specifications, and cross-functional dependencies. * Ability to break down complex problems and drive execution with strong engineering judgment. * Experience reviewing code, guiding engineers, and improving team quality standards. * Comfort operating in high-stakes environments where delivery, support, and stakeholder communication are critical. * Awareness of the current AI ecosystem and a proactive approach to adapting to evolving tools and patterns. * Curiosity and practical application of AI to engineering productivity, product capabilities, and operational workflows.
**Must-Have Skills:** * Backend development in a strongly typed or systems-oriented language. * Experience with relational databases and production data workflows. * Experience with asynchronous systems, queues, retries, and failure recovery patterns. * Production debugging and incident handling experience. * System design skills with practical trade-off analysis. * Strong communication and stakeholder management abilities. * Demonstrated ability to adapt to major tooling and ecosystem shifts, particularly in AI-assisted engineering. * Strong learning agility and comfort evaluating new tools and technical patterns.
**Good to Have:** * Experience in payments, fintech, banking, or compliance-heavy domains. * Exposure to NPCI-style or bank-side integrations. * Experience with cloud infrastructure, observability stacks, and operational tooling. * Experience mentoring engineering teams or leading technical initiatives on critical systems. * Hands-on exposure to AI-assisted developer tools, agentic workflows, or LLM-driven productivity systems. * Experience designing systems or workflows optimized for AI tooling in debugging, automation, or operations.
