Sarvam is building the bedrock of Sovereign AI for India. The company is developing India's full-stack sovereign AI platform, building across research, models, infrastructure and applications with a singular focus on making AI genuinely work for India. Sarvam works with leading enterprises and public institutions and is backed by Lightspeed, Peak XV, and Khosla Ventures. Sarvam partners with India's leading brands, including Tata Capital, SBI Life, CRED, IDFC, and LIC.
About the RoleWe are looking for a skilled Backend Engineer to join our Conversational Agents team, building Samvaad — our voice and AI-driven dialogue platform. A day at Samvaad means tackling hard problems, fast feedback, and real impact, all while working with a team that loves tinkering and shipping. You'll design and develop the server-side logic, APIs, and platform orchestration that powers AI conversations for millions of Indians.
What You'll DoBuild and maintain backend services — scalable APIs (REST/gRPC), fault-tolerant systems, and clean, testable code.
Design schemas, tune queries (Postgres/NoSQL), manage unstructured data, and apply caching and indexing strategies for performance.
Deliver reliable releases with full observability — metrics, logs, traces — and ensure backward compatibility.
Contribute to architecture discussions, resolve scaling and latency bottlenecks, and drive improvements in performance and reliability.
Champion best practices — enforce coding standards, mentor peers, and stay current with backend and Generative AI technologies.
Build enterprise-grade software with strong security practices in adherence to privacy and compliance policies.
Collaborate across teams — integrate models into production, define data contracts with frontend and product, and partner with DevOps for smooth deployments.
3–6 years of backend development experience, with exposure to distributed systems and container orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes).
Hands-on experience with at least one major cloud platform (AWS, GCP, or Azure).
Strong knowledge of SQL (Postgres/MySQL) and NoSQL (Cassandra/ScyllaDB), including schema design, query optimisation, and scaling.
Experience with message brokers (Kafka, RabbitMQ) or streaming systems.
Proficiency in algorithms, data structures, and asynchronous programming patterns.
Experience building and scaling WebSocket/gRPC/WebRTC/REST APIs.
Familiarity with logging, monitoring, and tracing tools (e.g. Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, OpenTelemetry).
Strong debugging skills with a focus on performance, scalability, and reliability.
Proven ability to own features end-to-end, review code, and drive process or architecture improvements.
End-to-end ownership of the full stack, including frontend technologies such as React, TypeScript, and Next.js.
Experience setting up CI/CD pipelines for automated testing and deployment.
Contributions to open-source projects or a strong GitHub portfolio showcasing backend work.
Sarvam is a fast-moving, high talent-density team building full-stack AI for India, working on problems that push the frontiers of AI with real population-scale impact.
Work alongside researchers, engineers, builders, and business leaders who move fast and hold each other to a very high bar
High ownership and high impact, from day one
Everything we do is AI-first, from the way we build and ship to the way we think about problems
You can work on problems that could change how an entire country learns, works, and communicates
If you want to work on problems at the frontier of AI in India, Sarvam is the place to be.
Skills Required
- 3-6 years of backend development experience with distributed systems and container orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes).
- Hands-on experience with at least one major cloud platform (AWS, GCP, or Azure).
- Strong knowledge of SQL (Postgres/MySQL) including schema design, query optimisation, and scaling.
- Experience with NoSQL databases (Cassandra/ScyllaDB) and managing unstructured data.
- Experience with message brokers or streaming systems (Kafka, RabbitMQ).
- Proficiency in algorithms, data structures, and asynchronous programming patterns.
- Experience building and scaling WebSocket/gRPC/WebRTC/REST APIs.
- Familiarity with logging, monitoring, and tracing tools (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, OpenTelemetry).
- Experience delivering reliable releases with full observability (metrics, logs, traces) and ensuring backward compatibility.
- Strong debugging skills focused on performance, scalability, and reliability.
- Proven ability to own features end-to-end, perform code reviews, and drive process or architecture improvements.
- Build enterprise-grade software with strong security practices and compliance awareness.
- End-to-end full-stack ownership including frontend technologies (React, TypeScript, Next.js).
- Experience setting up CI/CD pipelines for automated testing and deployment.
- Contributions to open-source projects or a strong GitHub portfolio showcasing backend work.
What We Do
We are an AI/ML research and development company on a mission to build reliable, performant, enterprise-grade AI systems at scale for India. We are committed to build the full-stack for generative AI for the rich & diverse landscape of India, mainly investing in: 1) Models: developing both efficient large scale Indic language models as well as bespoke enterprise models 2) Platform: building an enterprise-grade platform that empowers organisations to develop and ship creative and performant genAI applications at scale 3) Ecosystem: contributing to open-source models and datasets, as well as leading efforts for large scale data curation in public-good space
