Technical Lead

Tech Lead - Reliability & Distributed Product Engineering

1️⃣ About Almabase

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.

2️⃣ The Opportunity

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.

3️⃣ Role & Responsibilities

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.

4️⃣ 🛠 Requirements

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

5️⃣ What Success Looks Like

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

6️⃣ Why This Role Is High Impact

• You influence reliability across every product 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