Backend Engineer, API Team

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 Backend Engineers for our API team, responsible for exposing and managing a family of ML models — ASR, TTS, LLM, Vision, and more — over high-performance APIs. You will build low-latency, fault-tolerant, and cloud-agnostic systems that serve millions of requests reliably across Azure, AWS, GCP, and on-prem infrastructures.

What You'll Do

• Design, develop, and optimise Python-based APIs (FastAPI, Django, Flask, or similar) for serving ML models at scale.
• Build robust communication layers using HTTP, WebSockets, and gRPC.
• Architect low-latency, fault-tolerant, and secure backend systems for real-time inference workloads.
• Implement authentication, rate limiting, prioritisation, and secure coding practices.
• Develop and manage integrations with voice agent SDKs, LLM SDKs, and related AI interfaces.
• Work with PostgreSQL, Redis, and ClickHouse for data management and performance optimisation.
• Build event-driven and streaming architectures using Kafka and Redis Streams.
• Collaborate on canary deployments, feature rollouts, and CI/CD pipelines for smooth production releases.
• Ensure systems are observable, reliable, and vendor-agnostic across multiple cloud environments.

What We're Looking For

• Strong proficiency in Python and hands-on experience with FastAPI, Django, Flask, or similar frameworks.
• Deep understanding of HTTP, WebSockets, and gRPC protocols.
• Proven experience building low-latency, distributed backend systems.
• Hands-on experience with PostgreSQL, Redis, ClickHouse, or related data systems.
• Familiarity with Kafka or Redis Streams for message handling.
• Solid understanding of API authentication, authorisation, and security best practices.
• Experience with Docker, Kubernetes, and CI/CD pipelines.
• Hands-on experience with at least one major cloud platform (Azure preferred).

Bonus Points

• Experience with canary deployments, progressive rollouts, or feature flag systems.
• Prior work with ML inference systems or AI model serving infrastructure.
• Familiarity with observability and monitoring tools (Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry).
• 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.