SDE II

About Porter

Porter is building the operating system for intra-city logistics in India. With ~20 million orders per month, 500K+ daily-active drivers, and rapid scale ahead (1.5x growth expected next year), we solve complex real-world problems at massive scale, balancing speed, reliability, and cost efficiency in a highly operational environment.

Role Overview

High-Ownership Engineer | Scalable Systems Builder | Future System Leader

As an SDE-2 at Porter, you are a core builder of production systems at scale. You don’t just ship features — you build durable, reliable components that power millions of real-world transactions.

You are trusted with:

• Owning meaningful system components
• Designing robust solutions to non-trivial problems
• Making engineering trade-offs with business context
• Raising the quality bar of the codebase

This role is about strong independent ownership with growing system influence.

You are expected to think beyond tasks — toward reliability, scale, performance, and user impact.

Key Responsibilities

Design & Build at Scale

• Design and implement scalable services and modules within large distributed systems.
• Drive Low-Level Design independently and contribute meaningfully to High-Level Design discussions.
• Perform performance analysis and reason about scale, failure modes, and trade-offs.
• Build systems that are reliable, observable, and cost-aware.
• Write code that stands the test of time — modular, extensible, production-ready.

This is not feature execution — this is system construction.

Own Critical Components

• Own services or subsystems end-to-end — from design to production to operational excellence.
• Be accountable for uptime, performance, and maintainability of owned systems.
• Actively improve monitoring, alerting, and operational hygiene.
• Lead root cause analysis and implement preventive fixes.

Ownership here means technical accountability, not task completion.

Engineering Excellence

• Apply strong fundamentals in data structures, algorithms, and system design.
• Leverage AI tools to accelerate development while validating outputs rigorously.
• Anticipate edge cases and design for real-world chaos (load spikes, partial failures, latency constraints).
• Raise the quality bar in code reviews and engineering discussions.

Business & Product Impact

• Understand how your systems affect driver experience, customer reliability, and cost efficiency.
• Make trade-offs that balance speed, reliability, and frugality.
• Use metrics to evaluate the success of your systems.

You are not just solving engineering problems — you are solving business problems through engineering.

Team Impact

• Mentor SDE-1s and help them ramp faster.
• Influence code quality standards within your pod.
• Collaborate effectively with Product, Data, and Operations.
• Proactively surface risks and suggest improvements.

You are a pillar of your pod’s execution strength.

What We're Looking For

Experience

• 2–5 years of software development experience.
• Experience shipping production systems.
• Exposure to distributed systems or backend services at scale.
• Experience working in fast-paced, high-ownership environments (startups or scale-ups preferred).

Technical Skills

• Strong fundamentals in data structures, algorithms, and object-oriented design.
• Familiarity with modern backend stacks, distributed systems, and cloud infrastructure.
• Strong understanding of engineering operations: monitoring, alerting, reliability, and performance tuning.

AI & First-Principles Thinking

• Ability to use AI as a productivity tool, not a crutch.
• Strong judgment to validate AI-generated outputs and reason independently.
• Comfortable breaking down complex problems to fundamentals rather than pattern-matching solutions.

Leadership & Mindset

• Strong sense of ownership and accountability (Own It).
• User-first thinking with an understanding of business impact (User Obsession).
• Bias for action and execution in ambiguous situations (Keep Moving).
• Collaborative, empathetic, and resilient under pressure.
• Desire to raise the bar for talent, quality, and execution.

Why Join Porter?

• Build systems that operate at massive real-world scale.
• Solve unique logistics and operational challenges.
• Work in a culture that values ownership, frugality, speed, and impact.
• Significant scope to grow beyond SDE 2 into technical or leadership paths.