Senior Software Engineer I/II - Backend (Python)

About UrbanPiper

About the Team

How we work

What you'll do

• Ship to production in your first week. Then keep shipping.
• Take a merchant's "my prices are wrong on Zomato" from Support, find the cause in the logs and the data, and make sure it can't happen again.
• Design async pipelines that survive retries, partial failures and rate limits (Kafka, RabbitMQ, SQS, Temporal).
• Model messy catalogue data so that each new aggregator's quirks stay out of the core.
• Build the validation loops that make AI-written code safe to ship: tests, replays against real production payloads, staging checks.
• Instrument your services well enough that you find the bug before the merchant does.
• Review code, write design docs, and go on call for what you built.

You'll fit if

• You're AI-native. You run AI coding agents (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor or similar) every day, and not as ask-and-hope. You think before you prompt, give the agent the right context, and close every loop with a check. You have opinions on models, tools, plugins and skills, and you can defend them.
• You take responsibility for what ships, regardless of who wrote it. AI makes mistakes; you know where, and you catch them before production does. You own the code whether you typed it or not.
• You've built Python backends that run in production at meaningful scale. Django or FastAPI (we run both), REST and GraphQL APIs with versioning, pagination and error contracts.
• You know your fundamentals. Data structures, testing, SQL you can index and read a query plan, and the ways async systems fail.
• You write clearly. A PR description or incident note from you explains the trade-off.
• You've owned something. A service in production, a design across teams, engineers who got better working with you.

Good to have

• You have built your own AI tooling: agent skills, MCP servers, hooks, eval sets, or automations that run without you.
• Hands-on experience with Kubernetes, Helm, and GitOps with ArgoCD.
• Catalogue, e-commerce, or third-party marketplace integrations.
• Durable workflow engines such as Temporal.
• Experience at a fast-paced startup.

Your first 6 months

• Week 1: ship your first PR to Prod! You set up your environment and AI tooling yourself, from the code and the docs.
• Month 1: you take a real customer escalation, root-cause it from logs and data, and ship the permanent fix. You're on the on-call rotation.
• Month 3: a part of the menu pipeline is yours, end to end. Something you shipped is used daily by partners or Support, with alerts and dashboards you built.
• Month 6: you own a number, such as publish failure rate or ingestion time, and you've moved it. You've led a design across services, contributed to next quarter's roadmap for your area, and built tooling that makes the rest of the team faster.