Staff Engineer, API Platform

About this job

Sarvam AI is looking for a Staff Engineer to lead its API Platform team in Bengaluru. Sarvam is building India's full-stack sovereign AI platform, developing infrastructure, research, models, and applications to make artificial intelligence work for the country. In this role, you will take complete ownership of the model APIs that process millions of daily requests across HTTP and WebSockets, including billing, metering, and rate-limiting. A major part of your normal day involves leading the ongoing rewrite of the platform from Python and FastAPI to Go, designing high-scale distributed systems, optimizing audio and vision pipelines, and ensuring sub-second latency and multi-tenant reliability. You will operate as an individual contributor, setting technical standards, writing RFCs, and partnering closely with MLOps and inference teams to build robust streaming infrastructure and maintain a documentation-first engineering culture.

Responsibilities

• Design and evolve the end-to-end API platform from edge request to response
• Lead the architecture and execution of the Python to Go codebase rewrite
• Build and optimize audio pipelines for TTS chunking, sample-rate adjustment, and VAD-based silence detection
• Orchestrate vision pipelines for OCR, layout detection, and structured data extraction
• Manage streaming infrastructure using WebSockets, queue-based batch processing, and backpressure handling
• Engineer commercial layer features like metering, billing, prepaid wallets, and rate-limiting
• Ensure performance, reliability, and observability across a multi-tenant platform with sub-second latency SLOs

Requirements

• 7+ years of experience building production backend systems at scale
• Strong professional experience designing, building, and operating Go services under heavy load
• Comfortable working in Python, specifically with FastAPI
• Track record of designing and operating high-scale, low-latency, multi-tenant distributed systems
• Hands-on experience with real-time and streaming systems including WebSockets and long-lived connections
• Strong fundamentals in PostgreSQL and Redis for schema design, query tuning, and caching
• Experience running production services on Kubernetes
• Strong senior IC judgment regarding system design, trade-offs, and mentoring team members

Good to have

• Experience serving LLMs, ASR, TTS, or vision models in production
• Background in audio processing with pyav, FFmpeg, codecs, and VAD
• Experience building metering, billing, or wallet and payments infrastructure
• Previous experience at early- or growth-stage startups

Who should apply

This role suits an experienced senior individual contributor with a strong background in backend systems, high-scale distributed architecture, and Go programming. Ideal candidates enjoy taking complete ownership of core infrastructure, driving complex migrations like Python to Go, and working in fast-paced environments. You should have deep expertise in streaming, databases, and low-latency systems, along with a passion for mentoring engineers. Freshers cannot apply as the position explicitly requires 7+ years of relevant industry experience.

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