Engineering Manager

Engineering Manager – Backend

Location: Flexible / Hybrid (Mon–Fri)

Website: https://www.solarsquare.in

About the Role

SolarSquare is building the infrastructure for India's clean energy transition. We're looking for an Engineering Manager who doesn't just run a team — someone who builds one from the ground up, makes consequential technical bets, and treats engineering outcomes as business outcomes.

You'll own the technical strategy and delivery for our full-stack platform, lead a growing team of SDE1–SDE3 engineers, and work directly with product, design, and business to shape what we build and how fast we build it. This is a role for someone who has operated in resource-constrained environments, shipped systems that held up under pressure, and left every team they've led measurably better than they found it.

If you've only ever executed someone else's roadmap, this isn't the right fit. If you've ever built something from scratch and felt personally responsible for whether it worked.

What You'll Own

Team & Culture

Build, hire, and develop a high-performing full-stack engineering team including setting the bar for what "high-performing" means at SolarSquare

Create genuine career growth paths for engineers.

Maintain team health, retention, and motivation through periods of rapid change and ambiguity

Technical Strategy

Define and drive the architectural roadmap

Make and own technical bets: when to invest in platform, when to ship fast, when to pay down debt

Establish observability, reliability, and security standards before they become production fires

Delivery

Translate business goals into engineering priorities and push back when the translation is wrong

Set clear goals, metrics, and delivery expectations; hold yourself and the team accountable to them

Manage trade-offs between short-term product velocity and long-term engineering health

Cross-Functional Influence

Partner with Product, Design, and Business stakeholders and influence decisions upstream.

Communicate technical risk, cost, and complexity clearly to non-technical leadership

What We're Looking For

7–10 years of engineering experience, with at least 3 years leading teams.

Strong understanding of distributed systems design: idempotency, retries, DLQs, circuit breakers, eventual consistency, you've had to debug these in production.

Proven experience with event-driven architecture and Kafka including schema design, consumer group management, and failure recovery patterns.

Comfort with relational (PostgreSQL) and NoSQL (MongoDB, Redis, ) databases including query optimisation and schema design decisions at scale.

You've designed or operated systems handling meaningful traffic ideally 10K+ RPS. significant daily transaction volumes, or consumer-scale user bases (1M+ users)

You understand what 99.99% uptime actually costs to maintain and you've made the infrastructure and on-call decisions to back it.

You've written or enforced SLOs, SLAs, and incident management processes.

You've done a postmortem that changed something real about how the team operates.

Hands-on experience with AWS, GCP, or Azure beyond just deploying services, cost optimisation, right-sizing, architecture decisions that meaningfully reduced spend

Working knowledge of containerisation (Docker) and orchestration (Kubernetes) enough to unblock your team.

CI/CD pipeline ownership you've built or significantly improved a pipeline.

Experience with observability tooling: Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, ELK, or equivalent and more importantly, a philosophy about what to instrument and why

You've made the call between monolith and microservices and you can defend it with context.

You've managed technical debt consciously: triaged it, prioritised it, and made the case to stakeholders for when to pay it down

You've navigated a hard conversation with a product or business stakeholder and changed the outcome

Your engineers grow under you. You can point to people you've promoted, coached, or unblocked

You know how to build alignment across functions where incentives don't naturally align

You have clear examples of decisions you made under ambiguity and you can articulate the trade-offs you weighed

You've identified a systemic problem and fixed it without being asked

You've built or rebuilt something that wasn't working a team, a process, a system

Work Arrangement

Flexible work setup, including hybrid options. Monday to Friday. Learn more about us at https://www.solarsquare.in.