Backend Engineer – API Team

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, we are building cost-effective, high-performance AI systems tailored for the Indian market — enabling enterprises to deploy speech, language, and vision models at scale. Join us to build the API backbone that powers the next generation of AI systems for India and beyond.

Job Summary

We are hiring Backend Engineers for our API team, responsible for exposing and managing a family of ML models — ASR, TTS, LLM, Vision models, and more — over high-performance APIs.  You will work on building low-latency, fault-tolerant, and cloud-agnostic systems that serve millions of requests reliably, across different infrastructures including Azure, AWS, GCP, and on-prem setups.

Key Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and optimize Python-based APIs (FastAPI, Django, Flask, or similar) for serving ML models at scale.

• Work with HTTP, WebSockets, and gRPC to build robust communication layers.

• Architect low-latency, fault-tolerant, and secure backend systems for real-time inference workloads.

• Implement authentication, rate limiting, prioritization, and secure coding practices.

• Develop and manage integrations with voice agent SDKs, LLM SDKs, and related AI interfaces.

• Work with PostgreSQL, Redis, and ClickHouse for data management and performance optimization.

• Build event-driven and streaming architectures using Kafka and Redis Streams.

• Collaborate on canary deployments, feature rollouts, and CI/CD pipelines for smooth production releases.

• Ensure systems are observable, reliable, and vendor-agnostic across multiple cloud environments.

Must-Have Skills

• Strong proficiency in Python and experience with FastAPI, Django, Flask, or similar frameworks.

• Deep understanding of HTTP, WebSockets, and gRPC protocols.

• Proven experience building low-latency, distributed backend systems.

• Hands-on experience with PostgreSQL, Redis, ClickHouse, or related data systems.

• Familiarity with Kafka or Redis Streams for message handling.

• Solid understanding of API authentication, authorization, and security best practices.

• Experience with Docker, Kubernetes, and CI/CD pipelines.

• Hands-on experience with any major cloud platform (Azure preferred but not mandatory).

• Strong focus on secure coding practices and system reliability.

Good to Have

• Experience with canary deployments, progressive rollouts, or feature flag systems.

• Prior work with ML inference systems or AI model serving infrastructure.

• Familiarity with observability and monitoring tools (Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry).

• Contributions to open-source backend projects or a solid GitHub portfolio.

Location Bengaluru, India (Hybrid)