Vahan
AI recruiter for India's massive blue-collar workforce
Senior Backend Engineer
About the role
Vahan is India's largest AI-powered recruitment platform for blue-collar workers — backed by Y Combinator, Khosla Ventures, Temasek, and Bharti Airtel. We help companies like Swiggy, Zomato, Rapido, and Zepto hire at scale using AI and automation. Our mission is to connect 300 million blue-collar workers to economic opportunity, and we're just getting started.
We're looking for a Senior Backend Engineer who wants to own critical systems end to end — not just ship features, but drive technical direction, fix real scale problems, and raise the engineering bar across the team.
What you'll do
- Own the design, evolution, and reliability of high-impact backend systems — from architecture through production support
- Drive high-level and low-level system design with a focus on scalability, correctness, and long-term maintainability
- Diagnose and resolve database bottlenecks in PostgreSQL; optimize schemas, queries, indexes, and data access patterns
- Design and operate real-time and batch analytics pipelines (ClickHouse or equivalent)
- Improve code quality through design reviews, code reviews, and hands-on refactoring — and introduce patterns that prevent recurring issues
- Own production incidents end to end: resolution, post-mortems, and long-term reduction in operational load
- Mentor engineers across teams and influence technical direction through reasoning and example
What we're looking for
- 7+ years of backend engineering experience with strong expertise in Node.js
- Deep experience with PostgreSQL, including performance tuning
- Track record designing and operating distributed systems in production
- Experience with RabbitMQ or similar messaging systems (strong plus)
- Hands-on exposure to ClickHouse or large-scale analytics systems (strong plus)
- AWS deployment and operations experience (plus)
- Strong debugging, observability, and production reliability instincts
- Someone who improves messy systems incrementally, thinks in trade-offs, and influences without authority
What we offer
Competitive pay · Unlimited PTO · Comprehensive medical insurance · Monthly wellness leaves
About Vahan
At Vahan, our vision is to enable jobs for the next billion internet users via messaging apps such as WhatsApp. We’re backed by marquee investors such as Gokul Rajaram, who built AdSense at Google, Mekin Maheshwari, former Head of Engineering and Chief People Officer at Flipkart and Vir Kashyap, Co-Founder at Babajob.
