Staff Software Engineer - Python

About the job:Note: Tarlan is recruiting for a Staff Software Engineer role on behalf of a fast-growing, profitable HR Tech SaaS Startup. Tarlan is a Bengaluru-based recruiting firm managing this search.

Experience: 5-8 years

Location: Bengaluru

Stack: Python - FastAPI - Postgres

About the company:

A profitable, venture-backed startup building B2B API infrastructure for the HR and people operations ecosystem. The platform provides a unified integration layer across HR, payroll, benefits, and related systems, helping software companies connect to and manage these integrations without building them individually.

The company serves mid-market and enterprise customers, including organizations in regulated industries, and is looking to hire a Staff Software Engineer who can act as a second technical owner alongside the CTO.

What's broken or missing that we need help with:

• Write APIs: The platform already supports read operations across a large number of systems. Write APIs are where the real complexity lies: payroll deductions, employee creation, benefits enrollment, and other critical workflows. Every write API is part research project (understanding undocumented behavior) and part reliability problem (idempotency, retries, partial failures). We need someone who can own this surface end-to-end.

• On-prem deployments: Enterprise customers need the platform deployed within their own VPC or infrastructure environments. One such deployment has already been completed. We now need a clean, repeatable pattern that can scale across future customers.

• Hiring: You'll play a significant role in interviewing engineering candidates over the next 12 months. The quality of the next set of hires will have a meaningful impact on the future of the engineering organization.

What this role really is:

• This is a Staff IC role with leverage, not a manager role.

• You'll spend most days writing code, but the code you write should remove constraints for the rest of the team rather than simply close tickets.

• You'll serve as a second opinion on difficult design decisions, a code reviewer who raises the engineering bar, and someone engineers can escalate to when they're stuck.

• You'll also take on responsibilities that occasionally overlap with leadership work: interviewing, mentoring, and helping resolve technical disagreements, but as a peer and technical leader rather than a people manager.

Your first six months, roughly:

• Month 1: Onboard deeply. Read the codebase. Participate in architecture discussions. Focus on understanding before changing things.

• Months 2-3: Pick one of the key problem areas above, most likely Write APIs. Own it. Propose a plan, get buy-in, and begin execution.

• Month 4: Start running the senior side of the interview process. Help hire at least one engineer this quarter.

• Months 5-6: Ship meaningful infrastructure work. Participate in one on-call rotation per month. Become a second voice on architecture decisions that span multiple teams.

Who you are:

• 5-8 years of production engineering experience

• Deep expertise in Python and Postgres. FastAPI is ideal

• You've built and operated systems that handle real load. Not Twitter scale, but real customers losing real money when things break.

• You've worked at a startup before and know how to ship without every safety net in place

• You've designed APIs that other engineers consume and can clearly explain technical trade-offs

• You've mentored both junior and senior engineers and know how to give feedback that lands

• You're calm under pressure

Who you are not:

• A people manager looking to return to IC work as a temporary stop. This role is intended for someone who wants to remain deeply technical.

• An architect who prefers design discussions over writing production code. The role is hands-on.

• Someone whose experience has been exclusively in large technology companies. If you've never worked in an environment where customer context is highly visible, the transition may require adjustment.

• Someone who needs every problem to be greenfield. You'll spend meaningful time working within an existing codebase and improving systems you didn't originally build.

The Offer:

• Cash: Competitive compensation for a profitable startup at this stage.

• Equity: ESOPs with a 4-year vesting schedule and 1-year cliff.

• Location: Bengaluru. Relocation support available.

• Reporting: Directly to the CTO with a close working relationship.

• Equipment & health: MacBook Pro and dependent health insurance.