Staff Engineer, API Platform

Bengaluru, Karnataka

About the role

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.

About Sarvam AI

Sarvam AI develops artificial intelligence infrastructure, models, and applications designed to support Indian languages and enterprise use cases. Its platform provides capabilities such as text-to-speech, speech-to-text, translation, document digitization, dubbing, and conversational AI through APIs and deployable products. The company builds and operates a full-stack AI ecosystem that includes foundational models, application-layer tools, and infrastructure for serving AI workloads at scale. Sarvam’s offerings are used by enterprises, government organizations, and developers to automate workflows, process multilingual content, and enable AI-powered interactions across diverse linguistic contexts. The company also develops language and multimodal models tailored to Indian languages and regional requirements, with support for deployment in cloud, private cloud, on-premises, and air-gapped environments.

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Job details

Location

Bengaluru, Karnataka

Company

NameSarvam AI
IndustryArtificial Intelligence (AI)
Team Size4

Funding

Total raised

$41M

Last stage

Series A

Investors

LLightspeed
Peak XV Partners
Khosla Ventures
Bessemer Venture Partners
AAmazon

Founders

VR

Vivek Raghavan

Co-Founder

LinkedIn
PK

Pratyush Kumar

Co-Founder & CEO

LinkedIn

What happens next.

No applications, no recruiter spam. Just the intro.

01

Confirm the fit

A few questions to make sure this role is the right shape for you. Two minutes.

02

I pitch you to the company

I write the intro, send it to the founder, and handle the back-and-forth.

03

A meeting lands on your calendar

If they’re a yes, I book the chat. You show up — that’s the whole job-hunt.