Software Engineer II - Backend & Product Engineering

Location: Jayanagar, Bengaluru — in office

Type: Full-time

Experience: 2–4 years preferred

Compensation: the posted range is fixed pay; ESOPs come over and above.

About Kulfi

Kulfi is where couples in India spend time together, even when they can't be in the same place.

About 100 million unmarried Indian couples don't get to be together most nights. Different cities, different homes, parents around. A phone is all they have. So they join a class just to be near each other, or stay on a one-way call, or watch a movie over video. They do all this for love, and nothing was built for them.

We are building that. Kulfi is a digital experiences app for couples, and close to a million people already use it. We did not get here by spending. Daily users grew 4x in 30 days this summer. We added 100,000 users in the first 20 days of August without paying for a single ad. 80% of all play happens between 9pm and midnight. That is bedtime, and we own it. We are backed by South Park Commons and by founders and CEOs from Swiggy, Mosaic Wellness, Snitch and Moonshot.

Next is an AI personalization engine for games. Every couple gets a new game every day, made for them on the spot from what they like. Our team already ships a new game in about two days. No couple should run out of things to do together.

India has more couples than any other country. We want every one of them on Kulfi.

Our backend sits underneath a private, real-time, two-person product. Reliability, latency, data correctness, and safe iteration matter—but so does shipping the smallest thing that creates user value.

The role

You will be the backend-heavy engineer who can still cross the stack. You will own APIs, data models, production reliability, debugging, and system evolution, while making scoped Flutter/web changes when that is the fastest way to deliver or diagnose a feature.

This is not an infrastructure-only role. You will work directly with founders, product, design, and less-experienced engineers. You should be willing to challenge a weak idea, propose a better one, and then help ship it.

What you will do

• Design, build, and operate backend services, APIs, data models, and asynchronous workflows.

• Own reliability: tests, observability, alerts, migrations, safe rollouts, rollback plans, and incident follow-through.

• Debug production behavior using evidence across client, network, services, cache/queues, and data.

• Make pragmatic architecture decisions for current scale while leaving a credible path to 10× growth.

• Partner with product and design on scope, UX implications, success metrics, and rollout.

• Make scoped changes in Flutter or web when needed to complete a feature or investigate an issue.

• Review code and technical proposals; help junior engineers improve judgment and self-review.

• Use AI tools to accelerate delivery without outsourcing understanding, security, or accountability.

What we are looking for

• Roughly 3–4 years building and operating production software; strong evidence matters more than exact tenure.

• Deep experience in at least one backend language and framework.

• Strong fundamentals in API design, relational data modeling, concurrency, caching/queues, and failure handling.

• Evidence of owning production incidents, difficult bugs, migrations, or reliability improvements.

• Ability to write maintainable code, meaningful tests, and useful logs/metrics.

• Product judgment: you can connect technical choices to user experience, activation, retention, speed, or cost.

• Enough app/web experience to read, debug, and make scoped changes outside the backend.

• Clear written and verbal communication, including direct but constructive technical pushback.

• Comfort working in person in Jayanagar, Bengaluru.

Useful, not mandatory

• Flutter/Dart or native iOS/Android fundamentals.

• Real-time multiplayer, chat, WebSockets, event-driven systems, or offline/reconnect behavior.

• Redis, queues, background workers, database partitioning, or high-volume consumer systems.

• Security/privacy experience, including encrypted communication systems.

• Cloud infrastructure, CI/CD, tracing, and production capacity planning.

• Experience mentoring junior engineers or leading small technical projects.

What success looks like

Within three months, you own a backend area in production, have improved one reliability or delivery-speed bottleneck, have led a cross-stack feature through rollout and measurement, and have raised the team's standard for code review, testing, and operational follow-through.

Interview process

1. Application review based on production ownership and your written answers.

2. 15-20 minute screening call.

3. 105-minute backend product-engineering interview combining an incident deep dive, system design, live code/debugging, self-review, and a changed requirement.

4. 35-minute founder conversation covering product judgment, ownership, technical leadership, and mutual expectations.

5. References after mutual intent, with consent.

We allow normal documentation and AI tools. You must explain what the tools produced, what you changed, and how you verified the result.

Please answer the application questions yourself. Clear and specific beats polished and generic.