Software Engineer-Backend (3-5 years, Pune)

PhonePe runs India's best known digital payments app, with over 600 million registered users, more than 40 million merchant acceptance points and over 330 million transactions a day. This backend role is on that scale of system. You build robust and scalable web applications, design abstractions and contracts with clean separation of concerns, do high level design and functional modelling with guidance, make incremental architecture changes and analyse their impact, and do performance tuning on large scale distributed systems. It also expects you to work with a Product Manager to lead execution of medium sized projects and to mentor junior engineers. The stack is a general purpose language such as Java, C or C plus plus, with multithreading and concurrency, MySQL and NoSQL stores including HBase, Elasticsearch and Aerospike, on Linux. PhonePe put the range in the job title itself: 3 to 5 years.

What the posting asks for: extensive and expert programming experience in at least one general purpose language such as Java, C or C plus plus, and the ability to write maintainable, scalable, unit tested code. Also required are experience with multithreading and concurrency programming, experience building highly scalable business applications involving complex business flows and large data volumes, strong object oriented design skills with knowledge of design patterns and a genuine interest in designing clean module and class level interfaces, excellent coding ability so a design converts fluently into code, knowledge of test driven development, a good understanding of databases such as MySQL and NoSQL stores such as HBase, Elasticsearch and Aerospike, and full lifecycle development experience on Linux. PhonePe also asks for experience in a startup environment with high levels of ownership. The title states 3 to 5 years.

The real day to day: building robust and scalable web based applications, building abstractions and contracts with separation of concerns at larger scope, driving problem solving for high level business and technical problems, doing high level design with guidance including functional modelling and module breakdown, making incremental architecture changes and analysing their impact, performance tuning large scale distributed systems, working closely with a Product Manager to turn features into capability views and leading execution of medium sized projects, tracking the impact of what ships and iterating, and mentoring junior engineers while breaking execution into phases to make delivery predictable.

Location and setup: Pune. The posting does not state office days.

Honest fit guidance: PhonePe describes a culture where you own your work end to end from day one and where teams often build frameworks from scratch, which is a real signal about pace and expectations. The payments domain means correctness and availability matter more than shipping speed, and the volumes quoted are not marketing: 330 million transactions a day is a genuinely demanding backend environment. Note this is the Pune opening, and PhonePe also has a Bangalore SRE role on today's board, which is a different team and a different skill set.