Sr. Python Engineer

: We are looking for a Senior Python Engineer who brings depth in system design, API architecture, and backend delivery - combined with the ability to lead a small engineering team. This is a hands-on technical role with direct ownership: you will design systems, ship production-grade features, and grow the engineers around you. You will work closely with the Product and Tech Lead to define solutions end-to-end, from architecture to deployment. WHAT YOU WILL OWN : 1. System & API Design : - Lead the design of scalable backend systems and RESTful API contracts across product modules. - Define data models, service boundaries, and integration patterns that support long-term product growth. - Review and approve architecture decisions for features owned by your team. - Establish and enforce API design standards: versioning, error handling, pagination, rate limiting, and documentation (OpenAPI / Swagger). 2. Feature Delivery : - Take end-to-end ownership of features - from requirement breakdown and solutioning through build, QA, and production deployment. - Deliver - 85% of committed features on schedule across sprints with well-tested, production-ready code. - Break down large features into independently shippable tasks with clear acceptance criteria. - Proactively identify and communicate risks, dependencies, and blockers before they impact timelines. 3. Technical Execution : - Build high-quality Python services, APIs, and background workers using FastAPI, Django REST Framework, or equivalent. - Design and optimize relational and non-relational data stores (PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis) for performance and reliability. - Integrate message queues and event-driven patterns using RabbitMQ, Kafka, or Celery for async workloads. - Write clean, testable, and well-documented code with unit and integration test coverage - 80%. - Deploy and maintain services on cloud platforms (AWS / GCP / Azure) using Docker and CI/CD pipelines. 4. Team Handling & Mentorship : - Lead a small team of 2-4 engineers: assign tasks, conduct code reviews, and maintain sprint velocity. - Mentor junior and mid-level engineers through pair programming, design reviews, and 1:1 feedback sessions. - Create a culture of quality: enforce coding standards, review gates, and shared engineering practices. - Participate in hiring: conduct technical interviews and evaluate candidates for the engineering team. 5. Stakeholder Communication : - Provide weekly written updates on feature progress, risks, and technical decisions to the Tech Lead and PM. - Translate complex technical constraints into clear, non-technical language for product and business stakeholders. - Collaborate with cross-functional teams (Frontend, QA, DevOps, Data) to ensure seamless delivery. 6. Engineering Operations : - Own CI/CD pipeline health and deployment reliability for services under your domain. - Maintain a tracked technical debt backlog and resolve at least 20% per quarter. - Set up and monitor observability: logging, alerting, dashboards (Grafana, CloudWatch, Datadog). KEY PERFORMANCE INDICATORS (KPIS) : - Deliver 90% of sprint-committed features on time, with a - 90% rolling quarterly average. - API designs to require 1 structural rework comment per sprint after Tech Lead sign-off. - Zero P1 bugs and no more than 2 P2 bugs per sprint traced to owned services. - Maintain 80% unit and branch test coverage on all new and modified code, enforced as a CI gate. - Keep sprint delivery variance within 10% and grow team throughput by at least 10% quarter-on-quarter. - Resolve production incidents in owned services within 4 hours (MTTR), with every incident closed by a post-mortem. - Enable junior engineers to complete 70% of assigned tasks independently within 3 months of onboarding. - Achieve an average stakeholder satisfaction score of 4.0/5 in the quarterly 360- feedback survey. - Close at least 20% of logged technical debt items per quarter from a maintained backlog. - Ship 100% of new APIs with a complete OpenAPI spec, inline docstrings, and runbook entry at the time of deployment.