Senior Software Engineer

About Us: We are on a mission to help a million+ consumer brands with automated sales and user acquisition via AI omnichannel stack

BusinessOnBot is an omnichannel commerce stack for 500+ Shopify & WooCommerce brands, enabling high-ROI marketing/support across WhatsApp, Instagram, Email, SMS and commerce platforms like Swiggy, Zomato & PhonePe — powered by proprietary shopper intent data from 1/3rd of India’s shoppers (100M unique shoppers).

In 2026, Businessonbot has grown and is an EBITDA +ve company. We are a Y Combinator backed company (YC W21) and have closed our pre-series A round with Ant Financials on the Board. Backed by experienced founders/CXOs/directors from renowned companies like WhatsApp, Lulu group, OYO, Netflix, Pepsico, Cleartax, InMobi etc. to add to our team.

Role

We're looking for an Senior Software Engineer/Tech Lead : who can own the technical health and growth of our backend platform. You'll be part architect, part tech lead, part engineering manager. You won't just review code — you'll set the standard for how code is written, how systems are designed, and how the team thinks about quality, cost, and customer impact.

This is not a senior IC role where you write code all day. And it's not a pure lead role

where you're in meetings all day. It's the balance between the two — the person who makes the

team better while staying close enough to the code to make good decisions

What You'll Own

1. System Reliability & Upkeep

Own the health of a production multi-tenant Node.js/TypeScript backend serving real-time messaging traffic

Lead incident response, root cause analysis, and post-mortem culture

Identify and drive reduction of technical debt — proactively, not reactively

Ensure monitoring, alerting, and observability are in good shape (we use New Relic, Sentry, Pino structured logging)

Work across multiple backend services and ensure they integrate reliably

2. Scalable, Quality Engineering

Design and review system architecture decisions — schema changes, service boundaries, async workflows (we use Temporal.io), queue design

Drive engineering standards: code review culture, PR quality, test coverage, error handling patterns

Establish and enforce engineering practices that let the team ship fast without accumulating hidden risk

Evaluate build vs. buy decisions with a clear eye on long-term maintainability

3. Cost Consciousness

Maintain a clear understanding of infrastructure costs (AWS, third-party APIs, LLM usage, DB compute)

Actively flag cost anomalies and propose architectural or operational changes to address them

Balance engineering investment against business return — know when "good enough" is the right call

4. Team Standards & amp; Culture

Set a high bar for code quality — not pedantry, but clarity, maintainability, and correctness

Build a review culture where feedback is constructive, specific, and educational

Help engineers grow by pair debugging, design reviews, and code walkthroughs

Define and document coding conventions, architecture patterns, and engineering principles that persist beyond any individual

5. Customer Empathy

Understand that the systems you build serve real D2C businesses who depend on them to communicate with their customers

Treat reliability issues with the urgency of a customer escalation, not a backlog item

Stay connected to what support and product teams are seeing from customers — let that shape engineering priorities

6. Communication & Stakeholder Management

Translate technical complexity into clear, honest language for non-technical co-founders and stakeholders

Communicate risk, timelines, and tradeoffs clearly — no sugar-coating, no unnecessary alarm

Manage up: surface the right problems at the right time without waiting to be asked

Manage expectations — both internally with the team and externally with leadership

7. Balancing Tradeoffs

Navigate the tension between shipping fast and building right — and be able to articulate why you chose one over the other

Know when to take on short-term debt and when to push back

Make architectural decisions that serve the next 18 months, not just the next sprint

What We're Looking For

Must Have

4–5 years of backend software engineering experience, with at least 1 year in a lead or staff-level role

Strong command of TypeScript/Node.js in production (our primary stack)

Deep understanding of multi-tenant SaaS architecture patterns

Hands-on experience with relational databases (MySQL/PostgreSQL), ORM usage (TypeORM or similar), and writing efficient queries at scale

Experience designing and operating async/event-driven systems (message queues, workflow engines, or similar)

Comfort with cloud infrastructure (AWS preferred) and cost/performance monitoring

Strong pull request review discipline — you know what makes a good review and what makes a bad one

Strong Plus

Experience with real-time systems (WebSockets, Socket.IO, pub/sub patterns)

Exposure to LLM integration, RAG pipelines, or AI feature development in production

Experience with Temporal.io or similar workflow orchestration

Familiarity with WhatsApp Business API, omnichannel messaging, or e-commerce integrations

Prior experience at a startup in the 10–100 person range where you had to set standards, not just follow them

What We Don't Need

Someone who needs a perfectly defined problem before they can start

A pure IC who avoids people and process

A pure manager who's lost touch with the code

Someone who optimises for their own comfort over team outcomes

How You Think

You ask "why does this fail in production?" before asking "why didn't someone write a test?"

You think about the developer who reads your code six months from now

You're bothered by silent failures, swallowed errors, and fire-and-forget async calls

You believe good documentation and clear naming are not optional extras

You have opinions on architecture but hold them loosely when presented with better evidence

You understand that a cost spike is an engineering problem, not just a finance problem

You treat a customer-facing bug with more urgency than a refactor that only benefits the team

What You'll Walk Into

We'll be transparent with you:

A production codebase with real technical debt alongside genuinely good architecture

A fast-moving team that ships frequently

A company that takes reliability seriously but is still building the culture around it

Multiple backend services that need to be held together with clear ownership and standards

A product that's expanding into AI agents, voice workflows, and deeper e-commerce automation — meaning the technical surface area is growing fast

This is a role for someone who thrives in that kind of environment — not someone who needs it to be clean before they can contribute.

What We Offer

Meaningful ownership — you'll shape how engineering works here, not just execute someone else's vision

Direct access to founders and product decisions

Competitive compensation (cash + equity discussion based on profile)

A product that real businesses depend on every day — your work matters immediately