Senior Backend Engineer, Vision at Sarvam

About Sarvam Sarvam is building the bedrock of Sovereign AI for India. The company is developing India's full-stack sovereign AI platform, building across research, models, infrastructure and applications with a singular focus on making AI genuinely work for India. Sarvam works with leading enterprises and public institutions and is backed by Lightspeed, Peak XV, and Khosla Ventures. Sarvam partners with India's leading brands, including Tata Capital, SBI Life, CRED, IDFC, and LIC.   About the Role We are hiring a Senior Backend Engineer for the Vision team to own and evolve our Document Intelligence and Vision APIs, and the backend infrastructure powering the Akshar Platform. This is a high-ownership IC role with tech-lead responsibilities — you will lead architectural refactors across core API systems, build observability and security foundations, manage infrastructure and deployment resources, and raise the bar on developer experience for both external consumers and the internal team. You will also mentor engineers and help shape technical standards. Experience: 4–6 years | Location: Bengaluru, India (Hybrid)   What You'll Do • Architect and implement improvements to the Document Intelligence and Vision APIs for higher throughput, lower latency, and better fault tolerance. • Scale API services to handle growing production traffic reliably and efficiently. • Build a comprehensive observability stack to monitor API performance, deployments, storage, and the Akshar Platform — with alerting and automated fallbacks. • Manage allocation of infrastructure resources across APIs, model deployments, and cloud environments. • Build a strong security and reliability foundation across all public-facing and internal systems. • Improve developer experience for external API consumers (documentation, SDKs, error messages) and for internal processes (tooling, local dev setup, onboarding). • Lead architectural refactors across API design, data layer, async processing, and inference serving strategies. • Mentor backend engineers on the team and provide technical guidance. • Define and maintain CI/CD pipelines, AI-assisted code review, and deployment workflows for safe, frequent production releases.   What We're Looking For • Strong proficiency in Python, with deep experience building and optimising APIs using FastAPI or similar frameworks. • Proven track record designing and operating low-latency, high-throughput, fault-tolerant backend systems. • Deep understanding of HTTP and WebSocket protocols. • Strong experience with PostgreSQL, Redis, and MongoDB (or similar data stores) in production environments. • Experience with task queues and asynchronous processing using Celery, Taskiq, or equivalent. • Hands-on experience with Docker, Kubernetes, and container orchestration at scale. • Hands-on experience with Azure (preferred) or another major cloud platform (AWS, GCP), including resource planning and cost management. • Strong understanding of API authentication, authorisation, rate limiting, and security best practices. • Demonstrated ability to lead architectural refactors, guide engineers, and take full ownership of technical problems. • Master's in a technical field, or a bachelor's with 4+ years of relevant experience.   Bonus Points • Experience building and maintaining observability infrastructure (Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry) from scratch. • Experience designing and managing CI/CD pipelines and progressive deployment strategies (canary releases, feature flags). • Intermediate understanding of ML concepts, model deployment workflows, and inference infrastructure. • Prior experience improving developer experience — API documentation, SDK design, internal tooling, or developer onboarding. • Prior exposure to vision-based AI systems or document processing pipelines. • Contributions to open-source backend projects or a solid GitHub portfolio.   Why Sarvam? Sarvam is a fast-moving, high talent-density team building full-stack AI for India, working on problems that push the frontiers of AI with real population-scale impact. • Work alongside researchers, engineers, builders, and business leaders who move fast and hold each other to a very high bar • High ownership and high impact, from day one • Everything we do is AI-first, from the way we build and ship to the way we think about problems • You can work on problems that could change how an entire country learns, works, and communicates If you want to work on problems at the frontier of AI in India, Sarvam is the place to be.