Software Architect

Software Architect

Full-Time · Bengaluru (On-site) · Engineering Leadership

Experience: 9–15 years of backend engineering, including 3+ years in architecture roles

Scope: Cross-portfolio — hands-on architecture across 2–4 active Meraki Labs ventures

ABOUT MERAKI LABS

Meraki Labs is at the forefront of India's 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" startups—transforming 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 YOU'LL 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 company's 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 venture's 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 WE'RE LOOKING FOR

Must-Haves

• 9–15 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 2–4 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 - ritesh@merakilabs.com. You can connect with him for queries about the role.