Software Development Engineer 3, Samvaad

About Sarvam

Sarvam is building the bedrock of Sovereign AI for India. The company is developing India's full-stack sovereign AI platform, building across research, models, infrastructure and applications with a singular focus on making AI genuinely work for India. Sarvam works with leading enterprises and public institutions and is backed by Lightspeed, Peak XV, and Khosla Ventures. Sarvam partners with India's leading brands, including Tata Capital, SBI Life, CRED, IDFC, and LIC.

About the Role

We are looking for a skilled Backend Engineer to join our Conversational Agents team, building Samvaad — our voice and AI-driven dialogue platform. A day at Samvaad means tackling hard problems, fast feedback, and real impact, all while working with a team that loves tinkering and shipping. You'll design and develop the server-side logic, APIs, and platform orchestration that powers AI conversations for millions of Indians.

What You'll Do

• Build and maintain backend services — scalable APIs (REST/gRPC), fault-tolerant systems, and clean, testable code.

• Design schemas, tune queries (Postgres/NoSQL), manage unstructured data, and apply caching and indexing strategies for performance.

• Deliver reliable releases with full observability — metrics, logs, traces — and ensure backward compatibility.

• Contribute to architecture discussions, resolve scaling and latency bottlenecks, and drive improvements in performance and reliability.

• Champion best practices — enforce coding standards, mentor peers, and stay current with backend and Generative AI technologies.

• Build enterprise-grade software with strong security practices in adherence to privacy and compliance policies.

• Collaborate across teams — integrate models into production, define data contracts with frontend and product, and partner with DevOps for smooth deployments.

What We're Looking For

• 5-8 years of backend development experience, with exposure to distributed systems and container orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes).

• Demonstrated expertise in Python and Go & Hands-on experience with at least one major cloud platform (AWS, GCP, or Azure).

• Strong knowledge of SQL (Postgres/MySQL) and NoSQL (Cassandra/ScyllaDB), including schema design, query optimisation, and scaling.

• Experience with message brokers (Kafka, RabbitMQ) or streaming systems.

• Proficiency in algorithms, data structures, and asynchronous programming patterns.

• Experience building and scaling WebSocket/gRPC/WebRTC/REST APIs.

• Familiarity with logging, monitoring, and tracing tools (e.g. Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, OpenTelemetry).

• Strong debugging skills with a focus on performance, scalability, and reliability.

• Proven ability to own features end-to-end, review code, and drive process or architecture improvements.

Bonus Points

• End-to-end ownership of the full stack, including frontend technologies such as React, TypeScript, and Next.js.

• Experience setting up CI/CD pipelines for automated testing and deployment.

• Contributions to open-source projects or a strong GitHub portfolio showcasing backend work.

• Work alongside researchers, engineers, builders, and business leaders who move fast and hold each other to a very high bar

• High ownership and high impact, from day one

• Everything we do is AI-first, from the way we build and ship to the way we think about problems

• You can work on problems that could change how an entire country learns, works, and communicates