Lead Software Engineer

About the job

Location: Bengaluru

Experience: 7+ years

About Pocket FM

At our core, we are an AI-powered entertainment company with a deeply human-first philosophy. We believe technology should amplify creativity. Our proprietary AI systems work alongside writers, voice artists, and creative teams to help stories scale globally, faster, smarter, and with cultural depth and emotional integrity intact.

Today, Pocket FM is home to a vibrant community of 350+ million listeners, 500,000+ creators, and 100,000+ audio series. With over 140 billion minutes streamed annually, we have emerged as one of the fastest-growing media-tech companies in the world, and we are just getting started.

At Pocket FM, teams are encouraged to think boldly, move with intent, and build for long-term impact as we shape the future of audio-first storytelling worldwide.

About the role:

• Product and Delivery Ownership: Collaborate with Product and Design teams to understand requirements, user flows, and success metrics.
• Lead technical discovery, scope finalisation, and solution design across Backend and Frontend components.
• Own end-to-end execution for the assigned POD, including planning, estimation, dependency management, and delivery tracking.
• Proactively align scope, timelines, and dependencies across engineering, QA, and data teams.

Technical Leadership:

• Own system design and architectural decisions for features spanning APIs, services, and user-facing applications.
• Act as the primary technical authority for the POD, balancing near-term delivery with long-term platform health.
• Ensure consistent engineering standards, design principles, and coding practices across Backend and Frontend work.
• Provide hands-on technical guidance and unblock teams during complex implementation or integration challenges.
• Participate in hiring through technical interviews and candidate evaluation.

Delivery and Execution:

• Track delivery progress against agreed milestones and communicate risks early with mitigation plans.
• Partner with QA to ensure release readiness and quality gates are met.
• Support post-release monitoring, performance analysis, and iterative improvements based on production signals.
• Drive predictable delivery by breaking down work, assigning ownership, tracking progress, and course correcting when needed within the team.

Reliability and Incident Management:

• Lead incident response for production issues, coordinating across engineering, product, and operations teams.
• Drive root cause analysis, corrective actions, and long-term preventive measures.
• Identify recurring failure patterns and champion reliability, observability, and operational improvements.

Mentorship and Team Development:

• Mentor engineers through design discussions, code reviews, and ongoing technical feedback.
• Raise the overall technical bar of the POD by promoting strong engineering practices and ownership mindset.
• Partner with the Engineering Manager by providing input on performance trends, growth areas, and team health.

What You Will Need for this Position:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or equivalent practical experience.
• 6+ years of experience building and delivering production software systems.
• Prior experience leading a small team or POD with accountability for delivery and technical outcomes.
• Strong hands-on experience with Backend technologies such as Python or Golang and familiarity with modern Frontend frameworks such as React or similar.
• Solid understanding of system design, APIs, data stores, cloud infrastructure, and distributed systems.
• Experience operating in a scaled engineering environment with multiple teams and shared dependencies.
• Demonstrated ability to drive execution through influence rather than formal authority.
• Strong communication skills to explain technical tradeoffs to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Ability to manage ambiguity, prioritise effectively, and operate with a high level of ownership.

Bonus Qualities:

• Experience with AI-assisted development workflows, including tools such as Cursor, Claude Code, or similar systems.
• Research-oriented mindset toward emerging AI tools, frameworks, and techniques.
• Experience working with content management systems, content pipelines, or large-scale content platforms.
• Strong understanding of application security, including secure coding practices, data protection, access control, and handling sensitive user or content-related data.

Current Technology Stack:

• Backend Languages: Python, Golang
• Architecture: Microservices, REST, and event-driven systems
• Datastores: Relational and NoSQL databases
• Messaging and Streaming: Kafka, RabbitMQ, or equivalent
• Infrastructure: Cloud-based deployment on AWS or equivalent
• Frontend Languages and Frameworks: JavaScript, React or similar modern frameworks
• Application Architecture: Component-driven design, performance-focused UI patterns
• Platform and Engineering Practices: CI/CD pipelines, observability, monitoring and alerting systems, automated testing, and code quality tooling