Senior Staff Software Development Engineer

At Hike, we’re building the Rush Gaming Universe

To know more, check out work.hike.in.

We’re hiring a Senior Staff - Software Development Engineer to lead, architect, and scale high-performance backend systems. This is a hands-on leadership role where you’ll guide top-tier engineers, shape core backend infrastructure, and ensure seamless performance at scale. If you excel at designing robust architectures, optimizing mission-critical services, and driving engineering excellence across teams, this role is for you!

The Hike Code is our value system. We aim to live and breathe by these every single day. They inspire us to be the best we can be and they are weaved into every part of our decision-making, how we review performance, and much more. We have 9 core values:

• Top Talent in Every Role → Both a quest for greatness & shared values are important to us ‍♂️
• Owner not a Renter → Proactive & radically responsible. Everyone is an owner
• Pro-Sports Team → Strength-based, results-driven with a "team-first" attitude ⚽️
• Customer Obsession → We exist to delight our customers
• Think Deeply & Exercise Good Judgement → Clear mind, obsession to simplify & data-informed ‍♀️
• Build & Make Magic → Courage to walk into the unknown and pioneer new fronts
• Be Insatiably Curious & Keep Improving → Curiosity to acquire new perspectives, quickly ‍
• Move Fast & Be Dynamic → Ruthless prioritization & move fast ‍♂️
• Dream Big, Be Bold & Think Long Term → Courage to climb big mountains

Skills & experience we're looking for ‍

• 6+ years of relevant experience in building and scaling high-tech infrastructure | Top Talent in every role
• Have prior experience building from the ground up or significantly contributing to large-scale distributed systems/products | Top Talent in every role
• Proven experience in designing and scaling complex backend architectures and distributed systems with high availability and fault tolerance | Think Deeply & Exercise Good Judgement
• Strong hands-on experience with designing microservices, RESTful APIs, event-driven architectures, and asynchronous processing | Be Insatiably Curious & Keep Improving
• Deep understanding of system design, algorithms, data structures, and performance tuning | Think Deeply & Exercise Good Judgement
• Strong coding skills in one or more of Java, Go, C++, or similar languages | Top Talent in every role
• Practical experience with relational and NoSQL databases, caching layers (Redis, Memcached), and messaging systems (Kafka, RabbitMQ) | Think Deeply & Exercise Good Judgement
• Experience in setting up monitoring, logging, and alerting frameworks and tool for large-scale production systems | Think Deeply & Exercise Good Judgement
• Strong interpersonal skills with a proven ability to mentor, influence, and drive cross-team alignment | Pro sports team
• A strong inclination toward experimentation and adaptability, especially around emerging AI technologies — whether through side projects, rapid prototyping, or applying them to real-world systems. Familiarity with tools like GitHub Copilot, ChatGPT, Cursor, Replit, CodeWhisperer, or AI-powered codegen and debugging assistants is a big big plus and can make you stand out | Be Insatiably Curious & Keep Improving

• Leadership → Provide architectural vision and technical direction for backend systems, ensuring scalability, reliability, and security.
• Leadership → Lead, mentor, and upskill a team of talented engineers, fostering a culture of high performance and continuous learning.
• Leadership → Drive design and code reviews to maintain high standards of engineering excellence.
• Planning → Design and implement robust, high-performance backend services and APIs to support new and existing product features.
• Planning → Define and drive system-level improvements, refactoring, and technical debt reduction to keep systems healthy and future-ready.
• Planning → Contribute to long-term technical strategy, roadmap planning, and make build vs. buy decisions.
• Operations → Own the end-to-end uptime, reliability, and performance of production services. Implement strong observability, incident management, and root cause analysis practices.
• Operations → Optimize backend performance through load testing, profiling, and tuning to handle millions of users seamlessly.
• Operations → Ensure the highest levels of security, compliance, and data privacy in all backend systems.
• Collaboration → Partner with Product, Design, Data, and other engineering teams to deliver impactful products with speed and quality.
• Collaboration → Advocate for and implement best practices, reusable frameworks, and tools to increase engineering efficiency across teams.

Benefits → We have tremendous benefits & perks. Check out work.hike.in to know more

At Hike, we’re building the Rush Gaming Universe. We're taking gaming, one of the fastest-growing segments of entertainment in India, and converting it into a brand new source of economic opportunity. We're building a new kind of game economy where players can play, earn & grow and become true owners in the very networks that they help create.

Hike’s latest round of funding came in August 2021, where we raised capital from the world’s best product innovators & investors. The round was led by Justin Mateen (Co-Founder, Tinder). Rajeev Misra (CEO, SoftBank Vision Fund), Sean Rad (Co-Founder, Tinder), Arjun Sethi (Co-Founder & Partner, Tribe Capital), Bhavin Turakhia (Co-Founder, Zeta & Titan), Kunal Shah (Founder, Cred), Binny Bansal (Co-Founder, Flipkart), Aditya Agarwal (Partner in Residence, South Park Commons), Kunal Bahl (Co-Founder & CEO, Snapdeal) & Rohit Kumar Bansal (Co-Founder, Snapdeal), also participated in the round.

Currently, our dedicated team comprises approximately ~160 professionals who work remotely from over 30 different cities. The way we see it is we’ve been dropped off on a mountain that’s unexplored, without a map and it’s our job to figure things out. It’s an opportunity of a lifetime, a chance to do our life's best work.