Backend Engineer - Conversational Agents

Company Overview

Sarvam.ai is a pioneering generative AI startup headquartered in Bengaluru, India. Our mission is to make generative AI accessible and impactful for Bharat. Founded by a team of AI experts, Sarvam.ai is dedicated to developing cost-effective, high-performance AI agents tailored for the Indian market, enabling enterprises to tap into new opportunities and foster deeper customer connections. Join us in reshaping AI for India and beyond.

Job Summary

We are looking for a skilled Backend Engineer to join our Conversational Agents team. Our product is called “Samvaad” which means “dialogue”. A day at Samvaad means tackling hard problems, fast feedback, real impact — all while working with a team that loves tinkering and shipping.

As a Backend Engineer, your primary focus will be designing and developing server-side logic, APIs, and platform orchestration for serving voice and AI-driven applications while ensuring high performance, scalability, and security. Join us to build the backend that powers AI conversations that will change how millions of Indians interact with technology.

Key Responsibilities

• Develop and maintain backend services — design scalable APIs (like REST/gRPC), build fault-tolerant systems, and ensure clean, testable code.

• Optimize data and storage — design schemas, tune queries (Postgres/NoSQL), manage unstructured data, and apply caching/indexing for performance.

• Deliver reliable releases — Ensure observability with metrics, logs, and traces, backward compatible features.

• Contribute to architecture — participate in design 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.

• Enterprise-grade software — adopt best security practices in adherence to privacy and compliance policies.

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

Must-Have Skills and Qualifications

• Experience: 3–6 years in backend development, with exposure to distributed systems and container orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes).

• Cloud: Hands-on experience with at least one major cloud platform (AWS, GCP, or Azure).

• Databases: Strong knowledge of SQL (Postgres/MySQL) and NoSQL (Cassandra/Scylla DB) including schema design, query optimization, and scaling.

• Event-driven: Experience with message brokers (Kafka, RabbitMQ), or streaming systems.

• Programming: Proficiency in algorithms, data structures, and patterns such as asynchronous programming.

• APIs & Frameworks: Experience building and scaling Websocket/gRPC/WebRTC/REST APIs.

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

• Problem-Solving: Strong debugging skills and ability to optimize for performance, scalability, and reliability.

• Ownership: Proven ability to own features end-to-end, review code, and experience driving process or architecture improvements.

Good to Have

• Full-stack: End-to-end ownership of the stack from feature requirement to delivery, encompassing both backend and frontend technologies such as React, Typescript, NextJS.

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

• Open Source: Contributions to open-source projects or a strong GitHub portfolio showcasing backend development.