Senior Software Engineer, Performance & Reliability

SentiLink provides innovative identity and risk solutions, empowering institutions and individuals to transact with confidence. We’re building the future of identity verification in the United States replacing a clunky, ineffective, and expensive status quo with solutions that are 10x faster, smarter, and more accurate.

We’ve seen tremendous traction and are growing extremely quickly. Our real-time APIs have helped verify hundreds of millions of identities, starting with financial services and rapidly expanding into new markets. SentiLink is backed by world-class investors including Craft Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, NYCA, and Max Levchin.

We’ve earned recognition from TechCrunch, CNBC, Bloomberg, Forbes, Business Insider, PYMNTS, American Banker, LendIt, and have been named to the Forbes Fintech 50. We have also been named a 2026 FICO Industry Vanguard Decision Award Winner. Last but not least, we’ve even made history - we were the first company to go live with the eCBSV and testified before the United States House of Representatives on the future of identity.

SentiLink supports a variety of ways to work, ranging from fully remote to in-office. We operate as a digital-first company with strong collaboration across the U.S. and India. We maintain physical offices in Austin, San Francisco, New York City, Seattle, Los Angeles, and Chicago in the U.S., and in Gurugram (Delhi) and Bengaluru in India. If you’re located near one of these offices, we would love for you to spend time in the office regularly. Some roles are hybrid or in-office by design. For example, our engineering team in India works primarily from our Gurugram office.

Role:

Are you a passionate software engineer who thrives on solving tough production problems, writing robust code, and making systems fast, reliable, and observable? We're looking for a Software/Platform Engineer to join our SRE team, where you'll work at the intersection of software and infrastructure, improving the reliability and performance of our most critical applications. This is a software engineering role at its core. You'll spend your time writing production code, profiling services, and debugging across the stack, with the leverage of knowing your work improves every service, not just one. You'll collaborate closely with backend and product teams to fix performance bottlenecks, chase down complex issues, and build tooling that supports better observability, cost-efficiency, and operational excellence. You'll also help improve our incident response processes, evolve our monitoring strategy, and contribute directly to high-impact production systems.

Responsibilities:

• Design, write, and ship production-grade code to fix bugs, improve performance, and increase reliability across multiple services.

• Tackle complex coding challenges in live services — requiring solid understanding of algorithms, data structures, and system architecture.

• Identify and resolve application issues by diving deep across the stack — including backend code, database interactions, and infrastructure components — with the ability to implement code-level fixes where needed.

• Profile APIs and services under load to identify bottlenecks and implement fixes at the code, database, or configuration level.

• Design and evaluate infrastructure solutions — weighing tradeoffs in architecture, tooling choices, and system configuration — and clearly document rationale for decisions made.

• Collaborate effectively with US-based engineering teams, including availability for overlap hours in the late evening IST to support real-time coordination on incidents, design reviews, and cross-functional initiatives.

• Communicate clearly and proactively — write structured updates, flag blockers early, and synthesize technical context for both engineering and non-engineering audiences.

• Build tools, automation, and test frameworks to simulate traffic, validate behavior under stress, and prevent regressions.

• Improve observability by contributing to logs, metrics, dashboards, alerts, and distributed tracing.

• Collaborate on defining and measuring SLIs, SLOs, and SLAs to align reliability goals with business outcomes.

• Contribute to the development and maintenance of incident response runbooks and help improve operational processes to minimize downtime.

• Participate in incident response and root cause analysis and contribute to the engineering on-call rotation.

• Support cost optimization efforts.

• Research and evaluate new monitoring technologies or best practices to continuously improve system visibility and reliability.

Requirements:

• 7–8+ years of software development experience, with meaningful time in backend or SRE/infrastructure-adjacent roles.

• Strong coding skills in languages such as Python, Go, or similar.

• Proven ability to write and ship production code — and debug it under real-world conditions.

• Deep understanding of PostgreSQL or similar relational databases, including performance tuning and query optimization.

• Hands-on experience with distributed systems, containers (Docker), and Kubernetes in production — including making and defending architectural decisions, not just operating existing setups.

• Experience with observability and monitoring platforms like Datadog, CloudWatch, or Prometheus.

• Strong written and verbal communication skills — able to write clear technical proposals, postmortems, and async updates for distributed teams. Comfortable presenting tradeoffs and decisions to senior stakeholders.

• Comfortable working with US-based counterparts, including regular overlap hours in the late evening IST.

• Demonstrates a structured execution approach — breaks down ambiguous problems, tracks progress against milestones, and surfaces blockers before they become delays.

• Knowledge of SLIs, SLOs, and SLAs, and how they align with business objectives.

• Familiarity with cloud platforms (AWS preferred) and distributed systems.

• Comfortable working across unfamiliar codebases and resolving issues from code to infrastructure.

• Strong analytical, problem-solving, and collaboration skills.

• Prior experience in an IaC (Terraform/Terragrunt) or performance engineering role is a plus.

Perks:

• Employer paid group health insurance for you and your dependents

• 401(k) plan with employer match (or equivalent for non US-based roles)

• Flexible paid time off

• Regular company-wide in-person events

• Home office stipend, and more!

Corporate Values:

• Follow Through

• Deep Understanding

• Whatever It Takes

• Do Something Smart