About the company
Keka is a modern people platform for growing enterprises. HR, payroll and talent live in one core system, so teams spend less time on admin and more time on their people. More than 12,500 companies trust Keka, from fast-growing small businesses to large enterprises and global companies with teams across borders. We build software the way HR actually works. It feels human, sets up in days instead of months, and has AI built into every part of HR. With customers across India, the US and the Middle East, our engineering team is growing fast to keep up. That is where this role comes in.
About the role
As a Lead Software Engineer at Keka, you’ll be the technical anchor of your squad, the engineer your team turns to for the hardest problems in your domain. You’ll work with your Product Manager, Designer and adjacent squads to shape scope, surface technical risk early and ship systems that stay fast and reliable as usage grows. Success means what your squad ships and how well it runs in production.
You’ll lead a single squad technically, owning the services and systems it is responsible for. This is a hands-on individual contributor role with no direct reports, where you lead through design, code and mentorship rather than reporting lines.
What you’ll do
- Own the technical design for your squad’s services, turning product requirements into clear designs your team can build with confidence
- Write production code every sprint as one of the strongest hands-on contributors on the squad
- Build and maintain APIs, data models and background workflows that are clean, well-documented and easy for other teams to use
- Design for growth so your services stay fast and predictable under higher load and larger data volumes
- Own production quality end to end, from instrumentation and incident response to root-cause analysis and lasting fixes
- Raise the engineering bar through code review standards, test coverage, deployment hygiene and deliberate reduction of technical debt
- Mentor engineers through pairing, design discussions and code reviews, and represent your squad in cross-team discussions
What you’ll bring
- 5 to 8 years of experience building and running production software used by real customers
- Strong system design skills, with the ability to reason clearly about trade-offs between simplicity, performance and maintainability
- Hands-on skill in at least one modern backend language and framework, with solid grounding in clean code, testing and refactoring
- Practical experience with relational databases, NoSQL or caching layers, and messaging systems such as Kafka, RabbitMQ or SQS
- Experience designing, versioning and maintaining REST APIs that other teams or customers depend on
- Working knowledge of cloud services, containers, CI/CD, and secure handling of customer data in a multi-tenant product
- A track record of owning a service end to end and taking features from a rough idea to production
