Senior Technical Lead

About Almabase

We are on a mission to make education affordable to everyone by helping universities & schools build better relationships with their alumni, which leads to increased donations.

1. Democratizing quality education: Quality education is a great equalizer. When many students receive scholarships to access education because of alumni generosity they pay-it-forward when they have the capacity to do so. We derive our inspiration from actions like [this](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/18/opinion/bloomberg-college-donation-financial-aid.html)

2. Building a large profitable business: We envision building a capital-efficient, large profitable business to achieve our mission of democratising quality education. This means less dependence on investors & more ownership with the team. We are one of the few profitable Indian SaaS startups building [Value SaaS](https://valuesaas.co/).

3. Employee Wellness <> Customer Success: We give as much importance to each team member’s personal & professional success as much as we care about our customer's success. We believe it’s all about balance. Our recent [WFH policies](https://twitter.com/kalyanvarmak/status/1304065757844701185) reflect this belief.

• Mission: Make education affordable by helping universities & schools build better relationships with alumni, leading to increased donations.
• Impact so far:
• 3 M alumni connected
• 450 k students impacted
• $25 M donations raised
• 54 M engagement opportunities created
• 32 months profitable
• Culture & Benefits:

Opportunity

Almabase is scaling across Events, Giving, Communication, and Digital Engagement Platform (DEP).

To sustain global growth, Reliability, Scalability, and Security must become core product capabilities.

• Reliability: Eliminate even the smallest customer inconvenience, achieve 99.99% uptime, and sub-1 hour MTTR.
• Scalability: Handle rapid growth in data, users, and integrations without degrading performance; design for 10× capacity.
• Security: Uphold SOC 2 Type II and future frameworks (e.g., HIPAA for healthcare fundraising), prevent breaches, and embed secure-by-design development.

The Senior Technical Lead will:

• Lead Tech Leads across product and core systems.
• Own a product track directly as Product Tech Lead.
• Partner with the VP of Engineering to drive the reliability, scalability, and security roadmap across Almabase.

Appetite

We’re investing for the long term:

• 12-month horizon to embed reliability-first practices across engineering.
• Expectation of measurable improvement in uptime, bug leakage, P95 latency, and MTTR within the first year.

Solution — Role & Responsibilities

Lead & Mentor Tech Leads

• Mentor Product Tech Leads and Core Systems Tech Lead.
• Align them on reliability, scalability, and security objectives.
• Define team structure and rituals to keep these pillars front and center.

Direct Product Tech Leadership

• Act as Product Tech Lead for one or more products.
• Own bug leakage, page/API performance (P95), scalability of architecture, and product security posture.
• Guide architecture reviews, capacity planning, code reviews, and high-risk deployments.

Reliability, Scalability & Security Roadmap

• Reliability: Drive SLO/SLI definitions, proactive monitoring, and blameless postmortems.
• Scalability: Plan for growth in traffic, data, and integrations; introduce auto-scaling, caching strategies, and horizontal/vertical partitioning.
• Security: Work with the VP of Engineering and security partners to meet SOC 2 Type II and future standards; embed secure SDLC, threat modeling, and vulnerability management.

Culture & Mindset Shift

• Evolve engineering culture from fix when broken to design so it never breaks, never slows, never leaks.
• Make reliability, scalability, and security measurable and visible to every engineer.

Collaboration & Accountability

Primary Ownership & Accountability:

• Own the company-wide reliability roadmap.

• Be accountable for:

  • Bug leakage

  • Page/API performance (P95)

  • Uptime (99.9–99.99% target)

  • Product errors (Sentry)

• Co-own incident management, including MTTR reduction and postmortems, alongside product and systems teams.

• Maintain awareness of data sync accuracy for CRM integrations.

• Consult on asynchronous infrastructure (queues, Redis, workers).

• Provide guidance on email deliverability (bounce <2%, SPF/DKIM).

• Drive critical focus on payments reliability.

Collaboration with Product Tech Leads:

• Contribute to the company-wide reliability roadmap.

• Actively participate in bug leakage, page/API performance, uptime, and product error metrics.

• Maintain awareness of data sync accuracy.

• Support asynchronous infrastructure initiatives.

• Contribute to payments reliability and email deliverability efforts.

• Co-own incident management from a product perspective.

Collaboration with Core Systems Tech Lead:

• Contribute to the company-wide reliability roadmap.

• Serve as a consultant for bug leakage, page/API performance, uptime, and product errors.

• Be accountable for data sync accuracy.

• Take accountability for asynchronous infrastructure, payments reliability, and email deliverability.

• Co-own incident management from a systems perspective.

Requirements

To excel in this role, you must combine deep technical mastery with a strategic mindset focused on leveraging AI for internal efficiency and high-leverage outcomes.

I. Core Technical Leadership (Experience & Skills)

• Experience: 5+ years of backend engineering experience with 1+ years in a technical leadership role.
• Reliability Focus: Proven track record of driving product reliability, scalability, and performance at SaaS scale, including setting and meeting SLOs/SLIs, establishing strong observability, and leading incident management processes.
• Backend Expertise: Strong foundational expertise in backend development (**Python preferred**) and practical experience with major cloud infrastructure providers (Azure, AWS, or GCP).
• Systems Architecture: Deep knowledge of distributed systems, asynchronous infrastructure (queues, Redis, workers), and managing high-volume, reliable data integrations.
• Leadership & Coaching: Excellent leadership and communication skills; proven ability to coach and mentor other engineers/Tech Leads and effectively influence team culture and technical direction.

Nice to Have

• Familiarity with observability stacks (Datadog, Elasticsearch, Sentry).
• Experience within the CRM ecosystem (e.g., Blackbaud, Salesforce).

First-Year Outcomes

| 0-3 months | Build trust with tech leads & engineers; full product architecture & infra deep-dive; initial reliability assessment; deliver quick-win fixes; take direct ownership as Product Tech Lead. |

| 4-6 months | Implement company-wide SLO/SLI tracking and dashboards; establish cadence of blameless postmortems; align all Tech Leads on a single reliability strategy. |

| 7-12 months | Achieve or exceed 99.99% uptime across products; significantly reduce bug leakage & P95 latency; embed reliability-first mindset across engineering; have a multi-year reliability roadmap co-authored with VP of Engineering. |

Risks & No-Gos

• Not a pure manager role: must stay hands-on as a Product Tech Lead.
• Not a solo IC role: success depends on leading and scaling other Tech Leads.
• No compromise on observability and postmortem culture—these are foundational.