Software Architect

Software Architect

Full-Time Bengaluru (On-site) Engineering Leadership

Experience: 915 years of backend engineering including 3 years in architecture roles

Scope: Cross-portfolio hands-on architecture across 24 active Meraki Labs ventures

ABOUT MERAKI LABS

Meraki Labs is at the forefront of Indias deep-tech innovation landscape operating as a dynamic venture studio founded by visionary entrepreneur Mukesh Bansal (Founder - Myntra Cure Fit) and Peeyush Ranjan (Former Google VP and Flipkart CTO). Our mission is to build and rapidly scale AI-first moonshot startupstransforming groundbreaking ideas into next-generation industry leaders. Through a hands-on intensive partnership model we work closely with exceptional founders driving these ventures from concept to impact.

THE ROLE

As a Software Architect at Meraki Labs you will be the technical backbone of our portfolio companies engineering efforts. You will own the end-to-end backend architecture across multiple ventures from writing the first lines of infrastructure code to reviewing system designs at scale. You will work shoulder-to-shoulder with founders product managers and early engineering hires making consequential decisions that shape companies for years.

This is a high-trust high-autonomy role. You will be expected to operate independently move fast without breaking things and leave behind systems that teams can grow into not just systems that work today.

WHAT YOULL DO

Architecture & System Design

• Design and own scalable secure and maintainable backend architectures for new ventures from greenfield to production

• Establish architectural patterns microservices vs. monolith event-driven design API contracts tailored to each companys stage and constraints

• Define data models storage strategies and caching layers; make principled decisions on SQL vs. NoSQL relational vs. graph

• Conduct architecture reviews across portfolio companies flagging technical debt early and proposing remediation paths

Platform & Infrastructure

• Build and standardize cloud-native infrastructure on AWS / GCP Kubernetes Terraform CI/CD pipelines secret management and observability stacks

• Define SLOs SLIs and error budgets; implement reliability practices such as circuit breakers retries and graceful degradation

• Champion cost-efficient infrastructure decisions without sacrificing reliability or developer velocity

Engineering Leadership & Culture

• Partner with founders to make early technical hiring decisions identifying the right profiles for each ventures stage

• Mentor early-career engineers embedded within portfolio companies establishing coding standards review practices and engineering culture

• Translate ambiguous business requirements into clear technical specs; bridge the gap between product vision and execution reality

• Drive documentation discipline RFCs ADRs runbooks so engineering knowledge is never trapped in individual heads

Cross-Portfolio Leverage

• Identify shared infrastructure opportunities across portfolio companies auth layers payments notifications data pipelines and build reusable internal tooling

• Stay current on emerging backend patterns LLM integration paradigms and developer tooling; introduce relevant innovations across the studio

WHAT WERE LOOKING FOR

Must-Haves

• 915 years of professional backend engineering experience with demonstrable ownership of production systems

• 3 years in an explicit architecture tech lead or principal engineer role not just unofficial architecture work

• Deep proficiency in at least one strongly typed backend language (Python Go Java Kotlin or TypeScript/Node)

• Must have experience in prompt engineering for code generation integrating AI tools into team workflows and critically reviewing LLM output for correctness and architectural fit.

• Hands-on experience designing distributed systems message queues (Kafka RabbitMQ SQS) event sourcing CQRS idempotency

• Proven track record with cloud-native infrastructure on AWS or GCP: ECS/EKS RDS/Aurora Redis CDNs IAM and secrets management

• Strong command of API design REST GraphQL gRPC and the ability to reason about versioning backwards compatibility and consumer contracts

• Comfort operating in early-stage ambiguous environments where requirements change and timelines are tight

• Setting team norms around AI-assisted development: when to use it how to review AI-generated code and coaching engineers to apply architectural judgment and security scrutiny before anything ships.

Strong-to-Have

• Experience at a startup studio venture builder or working across multiple products simultaneously

• Familiarity with AI/ML integration patterns LLM APIs vector databases RAG pipelines embedding workflows

• Prior experience establishing engineering processes from scratch: on-call rotations incident response sprint cadences

• Contributions to open-source infrastructure tooling or published writing on system design

WHAT WE OFFER

• Meaningful equity we treat the architect role as a founding-adjacent position and compensation reflects that

• Exposure to 24 early-stage companies simultaneously the compacted learning of a decade in a few years

• Direct access to founders investors and domain experts across sectors

• Annual learning budget for conferences courses and books

The Recruiter for this role is Ritesh Kalvellu - You can connect with him for queries about the role.

Required Experience:

Staff IC