I’m looking to join a high-growth, early-stage startup as a Founding / Senior Backend Engineer.

8+ years building at startups, mostly Go/AWS.

I’ve been the first engineer, built entire backends from 0→1, scaled systems, shipped fintech/payments, data infra, video platforms and a lot in between.

But I don’t want to just pick up Jira tickets.

I want to own the product end-to-end. Talk to users. Decide features. Ship them. Watch the metrics. Fix what isn’t working.

And if growth needs SEO, ads, content, automations or influencer collabs, I want to do that too.

I built my own products and I grew this X account to 140K+ in AI. I understand engineering, product and distribution.

Ideally: YC / seed-stage, small team, high ownership, huge ambition.

Remote from India. Open to full-time or contractor.

If you’re a founder building something ambitious and need someone like this, DM me.

Portfolio: http://sairahul.dev

RTs appreciated - might help me find the startup I spend the next few years building. 🤍

Sai Rahul — Founding / Senior Backend Engineer

Source: https://sairahul.dev/ Founding / senior backend engineer · Bengaluru / India

I make complex products feelsimple.

8+ years designing and scaling the systems behind fintech, SpaceTech, social and entertainment products. I’m at my best owning a large slice of the product from 0→1 and 1→100.

8+years in early-stage teams

5×throughput on same resources

2.5krequests / second

140K+AI audience on X

Selected work

Proof, not promises.

A few systems I’ve owned end to end, with the outcome that mattered attached.

01 / Made Card

Financial infrastructure that removes friction.

At Made Card, I build the backend behind card, payment and data workflows for a growing B2B2C product.

Cheque processing: 2 hours → 5 minutesPasskeys for 2,000+ usersPayments for 100+ merchants

Go· WebAuthn · Plaid · Snowflake · Ledger systems

02 / Pixxel

Making satellite data orderable.

Architected the end-to-end ordering platform powering a core revenue path, across 5 teams and 5+ services.

Domain-Driven Design migrationPlatform-wide IAM90% Go test coverage

Go· PostgreSQL · Frontier IAM

03 / Wakao

Video infrastructure from zero.

As the first employee, designed the backend, processing pipeline and social primitives for a video platform.

MediaConvert pipelineEvent-driven social featuresNear-real-time rankings

Go· AWS · Redis · DynamoDB · SQS

04 / Gifskey

5× more capacity on the same resources.

Migrated a high-traffic backend from PHP to Go and rebuilt the search path around better data and caching decisions.

500 → 2,500 req/secSearch: 1,000ms → 200msTop queries: 50ms

Go· SQL · Nginx · AWS · Caching

05 / Wysh

Product backend, payments and cloud from scratch.

Built the foundation for a commerce product, including unified payment gateways, dynamic pricing and messaging.

4 payment gatewaysDynamic pricing engineBulk messaging tools

Go· Razorpay · Stripe · PayPal · AWS

Beyond the résumé

How I think in public.

Technical depth, product judgment, and the ownership to ship.

X / @sairahul1

Building with AI. Sharing what’s wild, practical and next.

140K+ people follow along for notes on agentic workflows, indie products and the changing shape of software work.

Open X profile 0→1 ownership

I build the first version and the system behind it.

I’ve been the first engineer at a startup, owning backend foundations from architecture through launch — and the product decisions around them.

Talk about an early-stage role Indie projects

Small bets, shipped often.

I’ve tried a lot of ideas and doubled down on NicheTrafficKit once it started making money — a practical loop of building, learning and iterating.

Visit NicheTrafficKit Working style

Calm systems. Clear ownership. Useful defaults.

I like difficult backend problems, tight feedback loops and teams that care about the user on the other side of the API.

Talk about a problem

Experience

Experience details