Backend Engineer, Chanakya

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

Backend Engineers on this team are builders, not maintainers. You will design and implement the core system infrastructure that powers Sarvam's 'atoms': MCP servers, on-prem deployment tooling, document ingestion pipelines, agentic backends, and API layers. These systems run in classified, air-gapped, and operationally constrained environments — or in enterprise environments with their own security, compliance, and integration constraints.

The architecture decisions you make will be inherited by every deployment that follows. You will ship real systems, not prototypes — and you will be accountable for how they behave in the field.

What You'll Do

• Design and build backend systems for Sarvam's atoms: MCP servers, document ingestion pipelines, agentic frameworks, NL-to-action APIs, and on-prem deployment tooling
• Build robust, well-designed API layers that connect Sarvam's AI stack to client-side frontends and operational systems
• Implement data ingestion and processing pipelines for unstructured data: PDFs, audio transcripts, imagery metadata, and geospatial feeds
• Build for constrained deployment environments: containerised, minimal-dependency, auditable — systems that a deployment engineer can operate without you in the room
• Write clean, well-tested, documented code that other engineers can extend and deployment teams can operate
• Collaborate with frontend engineers, the data scientist, and MLOps to ship complete atoms end-to-end
• Support Strategic Deployment Engineers with debugging, operational tooling, and field-level troubleshooting

What We're Looking For

• 3–6 years in backend engineering with production systems in continuous operation
• Strong Python: FastAPI, asyncio, Pydantic — production-grade; Go or Rust is a strong plus
• System design proficiency: distributed systems, job queues, async processing, caching, and failure handling
• API design: RESTful and/or GraphQL; gRPC experience is a plus
• Containerisation: Docker, Kubernetes or K3s; experience deploying in minimal-dependency environments
• Database experience: PostgreSQL, Redis, and vector databases (Qdrant, Chroma, Weaviate, or equivalent)
• Experience integrating with LLM APIs and building agentic pipelines — LangChain, LlamaIndex, or direct API integration

Bonus Points

• MCP protocol familiarity
• Security-hardened API design and on-prem deployment experience
• Comfort with air-gapped network constraints
• Experience with enterprise security and compliance requirements (SOC2, ISO 27001, or equivalent)

Note: We are looking for people who can own the outcomes described here, not people who match every line of this specification. If this problem excites you and you believe you can do this work, we want to hear from you.

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.