Software Development Engineer - II

Job Description: Software Development Engineer II (SDE-II), Backend Go | Fintech | AI-Native Engineering Company: POP Location: Bangalore Experience: 3–6 years Employment Type: Full-time About the Role We’re looking for an SDE-II with a strong fintech background to help build and scale the core backend systems behind POP’s financial products. You’ll design high-throughput, highly reliable services where correctness, concurrency, and security matter. You’ll work mostly in Go and PostgreSQL. You’ll also work closely with product, business, compliance, and partner teams to turn complex requirements into dependable systems. You’ll also help shape how POP engineers build software in an AI-native way, using agentic tools across the development lifecycle to ship faster without compromising quality, security, or compliance. What You’ll Do Backend Engineering ● Design, build, and own scalable backend services in Go that power payments, transactions, rewards, or other core financial flows. ● Build and tune concurrent and multi-threaded systems, using goroutines, channels, worker pools, and synchronization primitives, while handling race conditions, deadlocks, and contention safely. ● Model, query, and optimize PostgreSQL databases. This includes schema design, indexing, query tuning, transaction isolation, locking strategies, and migrations. ● Ensure data consistency and integrity in money-movement flows through idempotency, retries, reconciliation, and ledger-style accounting. ● Integrate with external financial partners such as banks, payment gateways, UPI/card networks, and lending partners, and handle their failures gracefully. ● Take ownership of services in production, including monitoring, alerting, incident response, root-cause analysis, and continuous reliability improvements. ● Write clean, well-tested, maintainable code with a strong focus on security and regulatory compliance. Agentic Development Lifecycle (ADLC) ● Use AI coding agents (e.g. Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot) across the Agentic Development Lifecycle, from requirement breakdown and design to coding, testing, code review, documentation, and deployment. ● Build and maintain agent workflows, prompts, skills, and context files (e.g. CLAUDE.md, rules, custom commands) that help the team automate repetitive engineering tasks. ● Set up guardrails for AI-generated code, including review practices, test coverage, security checks, and audit trails suitable for a regulated fintech environment. ● Identify high-leverage areas for agentic automation, such as test generation, migration scripts, incident triage, log analysis, and PR reviews, and drive their adoption across the team. ● Share learnings and best practices so the wider engineering team becomes more productive with agentic tools. Collaboration and Leadership ● Work with stakeholders across product, business, operations, risk, and compliance to understand requirements, negotiate trade-offs, communicate timelines, and keep everyone aligned. ● Take part in design reviews and code reviews, and mentor junior engineers on engineering best practices. What We’re Looking For Must-have: ● 3–6 years of backend engineering experience, with at least 2 years in fintech (payments, lending, banking, wallets, cards, or similar). ● Strong hands-on experience with Go (Golang) in production systems. ● Solid experience with PostgreSQL, including query optimization, transactions, indexing, and handling high write and read volumes. ● Proven experience building and debugging multi-threaded / concurrent systems, with a good grasp of concurrency patterns, memory models, and common pitfalls. ● Good understanding of distributed systems concepts such as consistency, idempotency, fault tolerance, and eventual consistency. ● Experience designing RESTful APIs. ● Hands-on experience using AI coding agents in day-to-day development, with a clear understanding of where they help and where human judgment is essential. ● Ability to critically review, validate, and test AI-generated code, especially for concurrency bugs, data integrity issues, and security vulnerabilities. ● Strong stakeholder management and communication skills. You should be comfortable gathering requirements from non-technical teams, pushing back with clear reasoning, and giving proactive updates. ● A strong sense of ownership and accountability for production systems. Good to have: ● Familiarity with financial domain concepts such as double-entry ledgers, reconciliation, settlements, refunds, and chargebacks. ● Exposure to Indian fintech regulations and ecosystems (RBI guidelines, UPI, NPCI, PCI-DSS). ● Experience building agentic workflows or integrations using LLM APIs, MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers, or agent frameworks. ● Familiarity with prompt engineering, context engineering, and evaluating agent output quality. ● Experience introducing AI-assisted development practices into a team and measuring their impact on velocity and quality. ● Experience with message queues and event streaming (Kafka, RabbitMQ, SQS). ● Experience with caching (Redis), containerization (Docker, Kubernetes), and cloud platforms (AWS/GCP). ● Knowledge of observability tooling (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, OpenTelemetry). ● Experience in a high-growth startup environment. What Success Looks Like (First 6 Months) ● You independently own one or more critical backend services end-to-end. ● You’ve shipped meaningful improvements to throughput, latency, or reliability in a concurrent system. ● You’ve introduced or improved at least one agentic workflow that measurably reduces engineering effort, such as faster PR reviews, automated test coverage, or quicker incident resolution. ● Product and business stakeholders see you as a trusted engineering partner. ● You actively contribute to design discussions and raise the code quality bar for the team. Why Join POP ● Build financial products used by ~4M customers at real scale. ● Be part of an AI-native engineering culture that invests in modern tools and ways of working. ● High ownership, fast decisions, and direct impact on business outcomes.