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.
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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
