Software Development Engineer III

About GoKwik GoKwik is India’s leading D2C Commerce Growth Platform, helping 15,000+ brands acquire, convert, engage, and retain shoppers. Powered by a network of 200M+ shoppers, 500M+ checkouts, and 1.5B+ customer conversations, we’re building the operating system for commerce growth. Why This Role Matters We are looking for a Software Development Engineer III to build and scale the core backend platform that powers merchant onboarding, storefronts, inventory management, and integrations with eCommerce platforms such as Shopify and WooCommerce. The role involves designing reliable, scalable backend services, making architectural decisions, and improving the performance and operational efficiency of production systems. You will work closely with Product, Engineering, and Infrastructure teams to build reusable platform capabilities, reduce manual interventions, and support the growing needs of merchants. You will also contribute to technical direction, engineering standards, and the development of other engineers on the team. What You’ll Own • Backend Platform Development: Design, develop, and maintain core backend services and reusable platform capabilities for merchant onboarding, storefronts, inventory management, and external integrations. • System Design and Architecture: Own low-level and high-level designs for shared services. Make decisions around APIs, data models, failure handling, performance, scalability, and maintainability, and document design decisions clearly. • Distributed Systems and Kafka: Design and operate event-driven systems using Kafka, including topic and partition strategies, consumer groups, message ordering, idempotency, retries, dead-letter queues, consumer lag monitoring, and schema evolution. • System Performance and Optimisation: Improve SQL query performance, caching, queuing, and service efficiency. Investigate production bottlenecks and implement solutions that address root causes. • Platform Integrations and Data Synchronisation: Build reliable, bi-directional integrations with eCommerce platforms and external systems. Use patterns such as outbox, change data capture (CDC), reconciliation jobs, and backfills while accounting for third-party API rate limits. • Scalability and Multi-Tenant Architecture: Design systems that support multiple merchants reliably, including data partitioning and sharding, workload isolation, backpressure management, and appropriate consistency models. • Production Reliability and Observability: Own production reliability through on-call support, incident response, root-cause analysis, postmortems, and service-level objectives (SLOs). Use observability and application performance monitoring tools, including SigNoz, to identify and resolve issues. • Infrastructure and Cost Optimisation: Identify opportunities to reduce infrastructure costs, manual support work, and recurring merchant-specific fixes without compromising system reliability or delivery speed. • Cross-Functional Collaboration: Work with Product, Frontend, Infrastructure, and Engineering teams to plan delivery, communicate technical decisions and risks, review designs, and manage production priorities. • Technical Leadership: Lead design reviews, establish engineering standards, review critical changes, and mentor SDE I and SDE II engineers. Contribute to technical direction across teams and promote clear documentation and execution practices. • AI Systems and Engineering Tools: Apply AI-assisted development tools where appropriate and demonstrate an understanding of AI system design, including LLM inference, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), vector search, agents, and guardrails. Who You Are • Have 6+ years of software engineering experience in a product or platform company, with hands-on ownership of production backend systems. • Have strong low-level and high-level system design skills and can evaluate trade-offs, justify architectural decisions, and take accountability for outcomes. • Have extensive hands-on experience with Kafka in production, including partitioning, ordering guarantees, consumer groups, rebalancing, delivery semantics, idempotency, dead-letter queues, lag monitoring, and failure recovery. • Have experience designing and scaling high-throughput systems, with measurable examples of improvements in throughput, latency, data volume, or system capacity. • Possess strong distributed systems fundamentals, including consistency and availability trade-offs, sharding, rate limiting, backpressure, and graceful degradation. • Have a solid understanding of SQL databases, data modelling, transactions, indexing, query optimisation, caching, and queuing systems. • Have practical experience with production ownership, on-call responsibilities, incident management, reliability targets, root-cause analysis, and permanent corrective actions. • Have experience with application performance monitoring and observability tools, preferably including open-source solutions such as SigNoz. • Have demonstrated the ability to optimise database queries and infrastructure costs. • Can communicate technical designs, document services, manage technical stakeholders, and explain complex engineering decisions clearly. • Are proficient in Node.js or Golang and their associated frameworks, or have strong experience in one of these languages with the ability to contribute to the team’s technology stack. • Demonstrate strong ownership, data-driven decision-making, and a proactive approach to identifying and resolving problems. • Have experience mentoring engineers and contributing to technical standards and engineering practices. Why GoKwik At GoKwik, you will work on core commerce technology that supports a growing ecosystem of D2C brands. You will have the opportunity to solve complex backend and distributed systems challenges, shape platform architecture, improve production reliability, and influence engineering practices across teams. The role combines hands-on development with technical leadership and offers the opportunity to build scalable, reliable systems that support the next phase of commerce growth. Department: Engineering Experience: 6 - 9 Years