Staff Engineer, API Platform

About Sarvam

Sarvam is building the bedrock of Sovereign AI for India. The company is developing India’s full-stack sovereign AI platform, building across research, models, infrastructure and applications with a singular focus on making AI genuinely work for India. Sarvam works with leading enterprises and public institutions and is backed by Lightspeed, Peak XV, and Khosla Ventures. Sarvam partners with India’s leading brands, including Tata Capital, SBI Life, CRED, IDFC, and LIC.

About the Role

Sarvam's model APIs (ASR, TTS, Vision, LLM, Translate) are how developers and enterprises ship products on our foundation models. The platform handles tens of millions of API calls every day, over HTTP and WebSockets, with metering, billing, prepaid wallets, and rate-limiting all part of the same stack. Today it's FastAPI and Python; we're in the middle of rewriting it in Go.

We're hiring a Staff Engineer to own this platform end-to-end. The architecture. The reliability. The performance. The standards. This is an IC role.

What You’ll Do

The end-to-end design and evolution of the platform, from the moment a request hits the edge to the response that goes back out

The Python→Go rewrite: leading the architecture, setting the patterns, and bringing the platform across without compromising reliability

Audio pipeline engineering: TTS chunking around model context limits, sample-rate adjustments and format encoding, VAD-based silence detection for ASR

Vision pipelines: orchestrating OCR, layout detection, and VLM harnesses for structured data extraction

Streaming infrastructure: WebSocket connections, queue-based batch processing, back pressure, low-latency model invocation

The commercial layer: metering, billing, prepaid wallet management, and rate-limiting, engineered to the same bar as the model APIs themselves

Performance and reliability for a multi-tenant platform operating at sub-second latency SLOs

Observability (logging, metrics, tracing), so the team can debug production confidently and quickly

Integration testing infrastructure: the harness that lets us ship fast without breaking customer-facing APIs

Close partnership with the Inference and MLOps teams, mentoring them on production engineering so model serving is fast, reliable, and operable

Design-first, documentation-first engineering culture within the team: RFCs before code, decisions written down, no tribal knowledge

What We’re Looking For

7+ years building production backend systems at scale

Strong Go in production: you've designed, built, and operated Go services under real load

Comfortable in Python: you'll work in both languages through the rewrite, and FastAPI is the current foundation

A track record of designing and operating high-scale, low-latency, multi-tenant distributed systems

Hands-on experience with real-time / streaming systems: WebSockets, long-lived connections, backpressure

Strong PostgreSQL and Redis fundamentals: schema design, query performance, caching strategy

Comfort running services on Kubernetes in production

The judgment of a senior IC: when to build vs. buy, when to optimize vs. ship, when to abstract vs. inline, and how to bring others up with you

Bonus Points

Experience serving LLMs, ASR, TTS, or vision models in production

Background in audio processing (pyav, FFmpeg, codec / sample-rate work, VAD)

Experience building metering, billing, or wallet / payments infrastructure

Time at an early- or growth-stage startup: comfort with ambiguity, speed, and ownership

Why Sarvam?

Sarvam is a fast-moving, high talent-density team building full-stack AI for India, working on problems that push the frontiers of AI with real population-scale impact.

Work alongside researchers, engineers, builders, and business leaders who move fast and hold each other to a very high bar

High ownership and high impact, from day one

Everything we do is AI-first, from the way we build and ship to the way we think about problems

You can work on problems that could change how an entire country learns, works, and communicates

If you want to work on problems at the frontier of AI in India, Sarvam is the place to be.