Tech Lead role at Y-Combinator backed SalaryBox, building India’s leading attendance & payroll app for MSMEs. Hands-on architecture, full-stack development, and team mentorship.

About the Company

SalaryBox is India’s leading attendance and payroll application, designed specifically for the nation’s 63 million Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs). Launched in January 2021 and backed by the prestigious Y-Combinator accelerator, the app has already crossed 4 million downloads. By simplifying attendance tracking, payroll processing, and compliance management, SalaryBox empowers business owners and their teams to focus on growth rather than administrative burdens. The company operates with the agility of a young startup yet serves a massive user base, making it an exciting environment for engineers who want to build products that impact millions.

Role Overview

We are seeking an experienced Tech Lead to drive the technical direction of our core platform. This is a high-impact, hands-on leadership role where you will own architecture decisions, mentor a growing engineering team, and deliver critical business features in a fast-paced, startup environment. As a Tech Lead at SalaryBox, you will be deeply involved in both backend and frontend development while ensuring the platform remains scalable, reliable, and secure. You will collaborate closely with product managers, designers, and other stakeholders to turn ambitious ideas into production-grade solutions.

Key Responsibilities

• Architecture & System Design: Make sound decisions around scalability, reliability, security, and maintainability of the entire product stack.
• Hands-on Development: Remain deeply engaged with the codebase; write, review, and ship production code for critical product initiatives.
• Project Ownership: Take end-to-end ownership of technically challenging projects—from requirement gathering, design, and implementation to deployment, monitoring, and iterative improvement.
• Team Leadership & Mentorship: Lead and mentor a team of 3–6 engineers, helping them grow technically through code reviews, pair programming, and knowledge sharing sessions.
• Cross-functional Collaboration: Work closely with product managers, designers, and business stakeholders to translate requirements into robust technical solutions.
• Quality & Process: Champion engineering best practices, including testing, code quality, security, and performance optimization. Build systems from scratch rather than relying on large-enterprise tooling.
• Adaptability: Wear multiple hats as needed—whether diving into the frontend, debugging backend microservices, or automating deployment pipelines.

Tech Stack

• Backend: Experience with modern server-side frameworks such as Node.js or Python/Django; strong grasp of RESTful API design, databases (SQL & NoSQL), and distributed systems concepts.
• Frontend: Proficiency in React.js or similar modern JavaScript frameworks; comfort with building responsive user interfaces.
• Mobile: Exposure to React Native or native mobile development is a plus (SalaryBox has an Android and iOS app).
• Cloud & DevOps: Familiarity with AWS, GCP, or Azure; hands-on experience with CI/CD pipelines, containerization (Docker), and monitoring tools.
• Tooling & Version Control: Git, issue tracking (Jira/Linear), and code testing frameworks (Jest, Mocha, etc.).
• Foundations: Strong understanding of data structures, algorithms, object-oriented programming, and system design fundamentals.

Ideal Candidate

You have 6–8 years of software engineering experience with at least 4 years in a technical leadership capacity. You are comfortable making architectural trade-offs and delivering production-ready software in a startup where speed and quality must coexist. Excellent communication and stakeholder-management skills are essential.

6–8 years of software engineering experience, with significant hands-on development experience. 4+ years of experience in a technical leadership capacity. Strong understanding of DSA, OOP, databases, APIs, distributed systems, system design, and software engineering fundamentals. Strong hands-on experience building and shipping production-grade applications. Proven experience owning architecture and technical decisions for products or large engineering initiatives. Strong experience with backend and frontend development, with the ability to understand and contribute across the stack. Strong understanding of engineering quality, testing, security, scalability, and performance. Excellent communication and stakeholder-management skills. Strong startup experience or demonstrated ability to operate in a startup-like environment.

Not specified