OPEN ROLE / ENG-2026-04

Senior Backend Engineer

You will own the ledger service that reconciles ₹40 crore of merchant settlements every night. It is the part of Halvard that cannot be wrong.

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LOCATION

Pune / Hybrid

TYPE

Full-time

LEVEL

IC4 — Senior

SALARY

₹48–68 LPA

01 — THE WORK

What the job actually is

Settlements run at 02:00 IST. Between then and 06:00, every merchant payout for the previous day is computed, netted against refunds and chargebacks, and written to an immutable ledger. When that job is late, 4,100 businesses notice before we do.

You would be the third engineer on that service and the first hired specifically for it. The person who wrote it left in January. It works. It is also 14,000 lines of Python with 31% coverage and one comment that says "do not touch".

  1. Rewrite the reconciliation engine incrementally, behind a shadow-write, without a maintenance window
  2. Take settlements from a 4-hour batch to a 40-minute one — the plan exists, nobody has had time
  3. Own the on-call rotation for ledger and payouts (one week in four, ~2 pages a month)
  4. Write the postmortems. We publish them internally, unedited

02 — YOU

What we are looking for

  • Six or more years writing backend services that handle money, or something equally unforgiving
  • Deep Postgres — you have debugged a lock contention problem in production and can explain what you saw
  • Comfortable being the person who says "this migration is not safe yet"
  • Python or Go day to day. We are Python; we will not hold Go against you

NOT REQUIRED

  • Fintech experience — half our payments team came from logistics and adtech
  • A CS degree
  • Kubernetes. We run on ECS and are not sorry

03 — THE TEAM

9
Engineers
4
Years in market
31%
Ledger coverage today
1 in 4
On-call weeks

“I joined to fix one queue and stayed because nobody asked me to pretend it was fine. The first thing my manager did was show me the incident log.”

SI

Sneha Iyer

Staff Engineer, Payments · joined 2024

04 — HIRING

Four steps, eleven days

1. Intro call — 30 min, with the hiring manager+

No coding. We describe the ledger problem honestly and you decide whether it sounds like a good year of your life.

2. Systems conversation — 60 min+

We walk through a real incident from our archive. No whiteboard algorithms, ever.

3. Code review — 90 min, paid+

You review an actual pull request from the settlements repo. We pay ₹15,000 for your time whether or not we proceed.

4. Offer — within 48 hours of step 3+

Band and equity are shared before you interview. We do not negotiate down from a published number.

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Applications close 30 September 2026, or when we hire. Whichever is first.