SARAL — Principal Engineer

Reports to: Head of Engineering
Stage: Lean team of 15 total, 4 engineers. Completely remote role.
Growth: Bootstrapped and profitable; 200+ US-based brands, crossed $1.5M ARR.
Compensation: Rs. 60 LPA (flexible for the right candidate)
Transitions to: Backend Lead role in 8 months to 1 year

Quick Highlights

Be part of the core engineering team at a company on a mission to build the world's best influencer operating system, powering partnerships between e-commerce brands and creators. You'll build robust, high-performance systems, shape product architecture, set engineering standards, and drive real business impact at a fast-growing startup. You'll own core parts end-to-end — unlike larger orgs with rigid handoffs between DevOps, DBAs, and Architects, our engineers make their own decisions, work across the stack, and ship faster.

We will prioritise / expedite your application if you have open-source contributions or have presented at well-known technical conferences, or if you've previously been a technical founder or co-founder. Be sure to highlight this in your email or resume.

About SARAL

SARAL is an easy-to-use, affordable influencer relationship management platform for e-commerce brands — find creators, automate outreach, manage relationships, and track performance. We're a self-funded company from India selling primarily to US-based brands. Our mission is to be the simplest results-oriented influencer marketing platform DTC brands use for all things involving creators.

You'd be a fit if…

• You've held a Backend Engineer (or Lead Backend Engineer) position before and have at least 4 years of experience.
• You have leadership experience leading teams for 2+ years.
• You have exceptional technical skills, a hunger to learn, and want to build interesting features that customers pay for in a lean team.
• You enjoy coding, have a bias for action, and are solution-oriented.
• You understand and empathise with customers — you proactively watch user sessions and truly get what we solve for with every feature.

You should not apply if

• You don't have at least 2 years of experience working at a single company.
• You're not passionate about coding — if writing code is just a paycheck and you're okay with shortcuts and piling up tech debt, SARAL isn't the place. We care deeply about craftsmanship, especially with AI handling the grunt work.
• You're not product- and customer-obsessed.
• You're looking for a short-term gig — we need people committed for the long haul.

Requirements

• Previously held a Backend Engineer or Lead Backend Engineer position with 4+ years working with backend technologies, specifically Node.js.
• Leadership experience leading teams for 2+ years.
• Strong grasp of system design principles — you can architect scalable, reliable, maintainable backend systems.
• Expert-level proficiency in TypeScript, PostgreSQL, and Express.js (non-negotiable).
• Hands-on experience with AWS (EC2, ECS, S3, Lambda, SQS) is good to have.
• Good understanding of caching strategies and implementation (Redis, Memcached, etc.).
• Strong command of SQL and database performance optimization — writing complex queries and tuning for efficiency.
• Proven experience designing, developing, and maintaining RESTful APIs.
• You collaborate effectively with engineers, product managers, designers, and leadership to clarify requirements, maintain project visibility, and deliver impact.

Responsibilities

• Engineering excellence — hold yourself to a high standard and treat engineering as a craft.
• Perform PR reviews, guide junior engineers, and continuously raise the bar for clean, high-quality code.
• Write robust APIs; design and implement scalable, maintainable backend services.
• Ensure modular, maintainable code to accommodate rapid feature iterations; optimize backend performance, latency, and throughput.
• Collaborate effectively across engineering, product, design, and leadership.
• Customer obsession — put customers first; care about how they feel using the product, not just the technology.

Our Core Values

• Customer Obsession — focused on customers' unmet needs; we go above and beyond. When they win, we win.
• Self-Agency — we take ownership of problems and fix them, whatever the source.
• Bias for Action — we do things today, not at the end of the week; we don't wait for approvals on easily reversible decisions.
• Systems Thinking — fix the system, not the problem. We break problems down to first principles and find 10x-better solutions.