Job Description

Tech Lead - Reliability & Distributed Product Engineering

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About Almabase

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We are on a mission to make education affordable to everyone by helping universities & schools build better relationships with their alumni, which leads to increased donations.

Democratizing quality education:

Quality education is a great equalizer. When many students receive scholarships to access education because of alumni generosity they pay-it-forward when they have the capacity to do so. We derive our inspiration from actions like this

Building a large profitable business

: We envision building a capital-efficient, large profitable business to achieve our mission of democratising quality education. This means less dependence on investors & more ownership with the team. We are one of the few profitable Indian SaaS startups building Value SaaS.

Employee Wellness <> Customer Success:

We give as much importance to each team member's personal & professional success as much as we care about our customer's success. We believe it's all about balance. Our recent WFH policies reflect this belief.

Mission:

Make education affordable by helping universities & schools build better relationships with alumni, leading to increased donations.

Impact so far:

+ 3 M alumni connected
+ 450 k students impacted
+ $25 M donations raised
+ 54 M engagement opportunities created
+ 32 months profitable

Culture & Benefits:

We live by a principle of

Freedom & Responsibility

, underpinned by an unwavering commitment to efficiency. We are an AI-first operating company, which means we actively invest in your professional growth and

AI fluency

. Expect dedicated time and resources for you to learn, experiment with, and adopt the latest AI tools to optimize your role--from coding and testing to strategic planning. Our comprehensive package includes: great salary & equity, holistic growth opportunities, full transparency, unlimited PTO & WFH flexibility, health insurance, and great food & workplace perks.

The Opportunity

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We are hiring

Tech Leads who work across the entire Almabase product suite

-- not limited to a single product.


You will lead technical execution, reliability, and system performance across:

Events Giving Digital Engagement Platform (DEP) Communication (Email/SMS) Payments (BBMS, Chariot, ACH) CRM Integrations (RE NXT, Salesforce, SFTP) Core Systems (Redis, queues, workers, async pipelines)

This is a

horizontal, system-wide leadership role

that ensures Almabase's products remain reliable, fast, secure, and scalable.

Role & Responsibilities

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1. Reliability Across All Products (Primary Accountability)

You are responsible for reliability metrics across the engineering org:

Uptime & SLA adherence P95 latency for pages and APIs Sentry error trends & bug leakage Distributed system correctness (sync, async, batching, retries) Queue depth & worker throughput Redis performance and stability Event/Giving day high-traffic readiness Systemic root-cause analysis & permanent fixes

You are the technical owner for: "Why did this break?" and "How do we ensure it never happens again?"

2. Architecture & Scaling

Work closely with the Sr. Technical Lead to:

Shape architecture across all products Improve data models and API design Introduce distributed system patterns (idempotent flows, orchestration, fan-out) Build scalable async pipelines Plan capacity for spikes (Giving Days, large events) Design fail-safes, timeouts, and circuit breakers

3. Hands-On Engineering Leadership

Lead design reviews across teams Unblock engineers on complex issues Own cross-product refactors Drive clean code, testing standards, and observability-first development Mentor engineers on system design and debugging

This is a

technical execution

role, not a people-management role.

4. Observability & Monitoring

Define SLIs/SLOs across products Build dashboards and alerting (Datadog, Sentry, logs, traces) Ensure issues are detected before customers notice Work with Core Systems to instrument distributed flows deeply

5. Security & Compliance

You will ensure product work aligns with:

SOC 2 Type II requirements Secure coding practices Proper secrets handling Audit logging, access correctness, and data integrity API protection & permission correctness

6. Cross-Functional Collaboration

Work directly with:

Product

turn specs into technically realistic scopes

Customer Success & Support

understand failures deeply

Core Systems

ensure infra reliability (Redis, queues, workers)

QA

define proper test strategy (load, integration, failure modes)

You function as a

technical glue

across pods.

Requirements

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Must Have

3-4+ years backend engineering experience (Python preferred) Strong understanding of distributed systems Deep understanding of sql databases and query optimisation Deep experience with Redis, queues, async jobs, retries, and fan-out flows Strong debugging skills across infra + app layers Ability to lead design decisions across multiple teams Solid data modeling & performance optimization experience Experience improving system reliability at scale Excellent communication & collaboration skills

Nice to Have

Datadog / Sentry / Elasticsearch Experience with RE NXT, Salesforce, or large CRM systems Prior reliability ownership for multi-product SaaS Experience with secure coding / SOC 2 practices

What Success Looks Like

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0-3 Months

Understand full architecture of Events/Giving/DEP/Communication Deliver immediate reliability wins (latency drops, error reductions) Become the go-to technical problem solver across pods

4-6 Months

Establish clear SLIs/SLOs for all key systems Introduce meaningful architectural guardrails Reduce Sentry noise and bug leakage significantly

7-12 Months

Achieve 99.9-99.99% uptime across core products Ensure predictable behavior of async pipelines Improve performance across high-traffic surfaces Engineering teams move faster because systems are cleaner and more stable

Why This Role Is High Impact

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You influence reliability across everyproduct used by millions of alumni You solve high-stakes problems like Giving Day load spikes You help Almabase become a

reliability-first, AI-first engineering org

You operate with massive ownership and autonomy * Your work directly impacts scholarships, donor generosity, and educational access