Senior Software Engineer / Tech Lead

**About Us:** We are on a mission to help a million+ consumer brands with automated sales and user acquisition via AI omnichannel stack BusinessOnBot is an omnichannel commerce stack for 500+ Shopify & WooCommerce brands, enabling high-ROI marketing/support across WhatsApp, Instagram, Email, SMS and commerce platforms like Swiggy, Zomato & PhonePe — powered by proprietary shopper intent data from 1/3rd of India’s shoppers (100M unique shoppers). In 2026, Businessonbot has grown and is an EBITDA +ve company. We are a Y Combinator backed company (YC W21) and have closed our pre-series A round with Ant Financials on the Board. Backed by experienced founders/CXOs/directors from renowned companies like WhatsApp, Lulu group, OYO, Netflix, Pepsico, Cleartax, InMobi etc. to add to our team. **Role** We're looking for an **Senior Software Engineer/Tech Lead** : who can own the technical health and growth of our backend platform. You'll be part architect, part tech lead, part engineering manager. You won't just review code — you'll set the standard for how code is written, how systems are designed, and how the team thinks about quality, cost, and customer impact. This is not a senior IC role where you write code all day. And it's not a pure lead role where you're in meetings all day. It's the balance between the two — the person who makes the team better while staying close enough to the code to make good decisions **What You'll Own** **1. System Reliability & Upkeep** * Own the health of a production multi-tenant Node.js/TypeScript backend serving real-time messaging traffic * Lead incident response, root cause analysis, and post-mortem culture * Identify and drive reduction of technical debt — proactively, not reactively * Ensure monitoring, alerting, and observability are in good shape (we use New Relic, Sentry, Pino structured logging) * Work across multiple backend services and ensure they integrate reliably **2. Scalable, Quality Engineering** * Design and review system architecture decisions — schema changes, service boundaries, async workflows (we use Temporal.io), queue design * Drive engineering standards: code review culture, PR quality, test coverage, error handling patterns * Establish and enforce engineering practices that let the team ship fast without accumulating hidden risk * Evaluate build vs. buy decisions with a clear eye on long-term maintainability **3. Cost Consciousness** * Maintain a clear understanding of infrastructure costs (AWS, third-party APIs, LLM usage, DB compute) * Actively flag cost anomalies and propose architectural or operational changes to address them * Balance engineering investment against business return — know when "good enough" is the right call **4. Team Standards & amp; Culture** * Set a high bar for code quality — not pedantry, but clarity, maintainability, and correctness * Build a review culture where feedback is constructive, specific, and educational * Help engineers grow by pair debugging, design reviews, and code walkthroughs * Define and document coding conventions, architecture patterns, and engineering principles that persist beyond any individual **5. Customer Empathy** * Understand that the systems you build serve real D2C businesses who depend on them to communicate with their customers * Treat reliability issues with the urgency of a customer escalation, not a backlog item * Stay connected to what support and product teams are seeing from customers — let that shape engineering priorities **6. Communication & Stakeholder Management** * Translate technical complexity into clear, honest language for non-technical co-founders and stakeholders * Communicate risk, timelines, and tradeoffs clearly — no sugar-coating, no unnecessary alarm * Manage up: surface the right problems at the right time without waiting to be asked * Manage expectations — both internally with the team and externally with leadership **7. Balancing Tradeoffs** * Navigate the tension between shipping fast and building right — and be able to articulate why you chose one over the other * Know when to take on short-term debt and when to push back * Make architectural decisions that serve the next 18 months, not just the next sprint **What We're Looking For** Must Have * 4–5 years of backend software engineering experience, with at least 1 year in a lead or staff-level role * Strong command of TypeScript/Node.js in production (our primary stack) * Deep understanding of multi-tenant SaaS architecture patterns * Hands-on experience with relational databases (MySQL/PostgreSQL), ORM usage (TypeORM or similar), and writing efficient queries at scale * Experience designing and operating async/event-driven systems (message queues, workflow engines, or similar) * Comfort with cloud infrastructure (AWS preferred) and cost/performance monitoring * Strong pull request review discipline — you know what makes a good review and what makes a bad one **Strong Plus** * Experience with real-time systems (WebSockets, Socket.IO, pub/sub patterns) * Exposure to LLM integration, RAG pipelines, or AI feature development in production * Experience with Temporal.io or similar workflow orchestration * Familiarity with WhatsApp Business API, omnichannel messaging, or e-commerce integrations * Prior experience at a startup in the 10–100 person range where you had to set standards, not just follow them **What We Don't Need** * Someone who needs a perfectly defined problem before they can start * A pure IC who avoids people and process * A pure manager who's lost touch with the code * Someone who optimises for their own comfort over team outcomes **How You Think** * You ask "why does this fail in production?" before asking "why didn't someone write a test?" * You think about the developer who reads your code six months from now * You're bothered by silent failures, swallowed errors, and fire-and-forget async calls * You believe good documentation and clear naming are not optional extras * You have opinions on architecture but hold them loosely when presented with better evidence * You understand that a cost spike is an engineering problem, not just a finance problem * You treat a customer-facing bug with more urgency than a refactor that only benefits the team **What You'll Walk Into** We'll be transparent with you: * A production codebase with real technical debt alongside genuinely good architecture * A fast-moving team that ships frequently * A company that takes reliability seriously but is still building the culture around it * Multiple backend services that need to be held together with clear ownership and standards * A product that's expanding into AI agents, voice workflows, and deeper e-commerce automation — meaning the technical surface area is growing fast * This is a role for someone who thrives in that kind of environment — not someone who needs it to be clean before they can contribute. **What We Offer** * Meaningful ownership — you'll shape how engineering works here, not just execute someone else's vision * Direct access to founders and product decisions * Competitive compensation (cash + equity discussion based on profile) * A product that real businesses depend on every day — your work matters immediately