Job Description

About Porter

Porter is building the operating system for intra-city logistics in India. With ~20 million orders per month, 500K+ daily-active drivers, and rapid scale ahead (1.5x growth expected next year), we solve complex real-world problems at massive scale, balancing speed, reliability, and cost efficiency in a highly operational environment.

Role Overview

High-Ownership Engineer | Scalable Systems Builder | Future System Leader

As an SDE-2 at Porter, you are a core builder of production systems at scale. You don’t just ship features — you build durable, reliable components that power millions of real-world transactions.

You are trusted with:

Owning meaningful system components
Designing robust solutions to non-trivial problems
Making engineering trade-offs with business context
Raising the quality bar of the codebase

This role is about strong independent ownership with growing system influence.

You are expected to think beyond tasks — toward reliability, scale, performance, and user impact.

Key Responsibilities

Design & Build at Scale

Design and implement scalable services and modules within large distributed systems.
Drive Low-Level Design independently and contribute meaningfully to High-Level Design discussions.
Perform performance analysis and reason about scale, failure modes, and trade-offs.
Build systems that are reliable, observable, and cost-aware.
Write code that stands the test of time — modular, extensible, production-ready.

This is not feature execution — this is system construction.

Own Critical Components

Own services or subsystems end-to-end — from design to production to operational excellence.
Be accountable for uptime, performance, and maintainability of owned systems.
Actively improve monitoring, alerting, and operational hygiene.
Lead root cause analysis and implement preventive fixes.

Ownership here means technical accountability, not task completion.

Engineering Excellence

Apply strong fundamentals in data structures, algorithms, and system design.
Leverage AI tools to accelerate development while validating outputs rigorously.
Anticipate edge cases and design for real-world chaos (load spikes, partial failures, latency constraints).
Raise the quality bar in code reviews and engineering discussions.

Business & Product Impact

Understand how your systems affect driver experience, customer reliability, and cost efficiency.
Make trade-offs that balance speed, reliability, and frugality.
Use metrics to evaluate the success of your systems.

You are not just solving engineering problems — you are solving business problems through engineering.

Team Impact

Mentor SDE-1s and help them ramp faster.
Influence code quality standards within your pod.
Collaborate effectively with Product, Data, and Operations.
Proactively surface risks and suggest improvements.

You are a pillar of your pod’s execution strength.

What We're Looking For

Experience

2–5 years of software development experience.
Experience shipping production systems.
Exposure to distributed systems or backend services at scale.
Experience working in fast-paced, high-ownership environments (startups or scale-ups preferred).

Technical Skills

Strong fundamentals in data structures, algorithms, and object-oriented design.
Familiarity with modern backend stacks, distributed systems, and cloud infrastructure.
Strong understanding of engineering operations: monitoring, alerting, reliability, and performance tuning.

AI & First-Principles Thinking

Ability to use AI as a productivity tool, not a crutch.
Strong judgment to validate AI-generated outputs and reason independently.
Comfortable breaking down complex problems to fundamentals rather than pattern-matching solutions.

Leadership & Mindset