Engineering Manager - Platform (Gurgaon)
About the Role:
The Engineering Manager, Platform at Razorpay is a highly technical, innovative, and hands-on leader with deep expertise in building and scaling core platform systems. You are passionate about solving complex technical challenges through robust, resilient, and highly scalable software. You will architect and operate foundational services that empower Razorpay's product engineering teams, ensuring the long-term health and scalability of our platform. While you will lead and mentor a team, you will also actively contribute to technical strategy, architectural decisions, and maintain a strong hands-on connection with coding and system design. You will champion a culture of engineering excellence, resilience, and continuous improvement, with a keen eye on product and business impact.
Roles and Responsibilities:
- Hands-on Technical Leadership & Platform Architecture: Actively engage in coding, perform in-depth code reviews, and partner with tech leads and senior engineers on complex platform-level problem-solving, system design, and architectural decisions. You will be an architect in the room, guiding the technical direction for critical platform initiatives.
- Resilience & Scalability Engineering: Drive the design, implementation, and operation of highly scalable and resilient distributed systems. You will champion practices like chaos engineering, robust error handling, effective caching strategies, and performance tuning to ensure our platform can handle extreme scale and traffic spikes (e.g., for events like IPL). You'll focus on reducing Mean Time To Recovery (MTTR) and maintaining high availability.
- Strategic Platform Development: Define and execute the technical strategy and roadmap for core platform services, leveraging cutting-edge technologies and methodologies to enhance workflows, optimize performance, and drive innovation across the engineering lifecycle. This includes owning charters for areas like API gateways, service mesh, messaging/eventing platforms, auth/identity, observability stacks, or deployment platforms.
- Customer & Business Centricity: Champion an internal customer-first approach, ensuring platform solutions are deeply aligned with business goals and directly contribute to measurable business impact. Treat internal engineering teams as customers of the platform.
- Process & Quality Champion: Drive engineering craftsmanship by championing effective processes, standards, and tools that enhance code quality, system reliability, and developer productivity. Foster a culture of ownership where teams run what they build.
- Talent & Growth Focus: Attract, hire, and technically mentor top-tier engineering talent, fostering their growth and empowering independent, data-driven decision-making. Develop engineers into senior/staff roles and maintain a high hiring bar.
- Collaborative Innovation: Lead technical collaborations across functions (Product, Business, Operations), providing insights, gathering requirements, and fostering bottom-up innovation that results in robust, scalable solutions aligned with business objectives.
- Site Reliability & Operations: Instill a strong sense of operational excellence, focusing on observability, automation, and proactive incident management.
Mandatory Qualifications:
Experience:
- 8–12 years of total experience in software engineering.
- 4–6 years of hands-on experience building and operating distributed systems at a serious scale.
- 2–3 years of people management experience, leading teams of 8–15 engineers (ideally including senior/staff ICs).
Technical Expertise:
- Deep proficiency in at least one backend programming language (preferably Go, Python, or Java). You should be able to review designs and code effectively.
- Proven experience with distributed systems, including personally dealing with challenges like cascading failures, thundering herds, cache stampedes, database hotspotting, and retry storms.
- Strong understanding of resilience engineering principles and practices (e.g., circuit breakers, graceful degradation, chaos engineering, load testing, capacity planning, SLOs/error budgets).
- Experience taking systems through significant scale-up (e.g., 10x traffic growth) or architectural evolution (e.g., monolith to microservices decomposition).
- Cloud-native fluency (AWS/GCP), containerization (Kubernetes), messaging/eventing (Kafka), caching (Redis), and observability stacks (Prometheus/Grafana/tracing).
- Experience using and building with LLMs is a plus.
People Management:
- Demonstrated ability to grow engineers into senior/staff or lead roles.
- Experience running hiring loops end-to-end and maintaining a high hiring bar.
- Proven ability to coach and mentor engineers, delegating outcomes rather than tasks, and focusing on team OKRs and operational health metrics.
- Ability to operate autonomously and represent platform decisions effectively, especially given that much of Razorpay's engineering leadership is based in Bangalore and Gurgaon.
Good to have:
- Contributions to open-source projects or personal side projects on GitHub.
- Experience in a product-driven company, understanding the full software development lifecycle.
- Comprehensive understanding of backend programming languages and ecosystem trends.
- Experience with Web Technologies, databases, and/or messaging systems.
