SDE2 - API Platform

About the Role

Sarvam's model APIs (LLM, ASR, TTS, Vision, Translate) are how developers and enterprises ship products on our foundation models. Our OpenAI-compatible LLM APIs route every request across multiple model deployments, with streaming, failover, metering, billing, 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 Software Engineer (SDE 2) to own core parts of this platform. The features. The reliability. The performance. This is an IC role.

What You'll Do

Building and evolving the LLM API platform, from the moment a request hits the edge to the response that goes back out

The Python→Go rewrite: building services in Go alongside the existing Python stack, without compromising reliability

Streaming infrastructure: SSE for Chat Completions and Responses, long-lived connections, clean handling of cancellations and client disconnects

Routing and failover: weighted provider chains, retries with backoff, and latency-driven admission control across model deployments

Protocol compatibility: keeping the API faithful to the OpenAI spec across inference servers (vLLM, SGLang, Dynamo) that each behave slightly differently

The commercial layer: metering, billing, and rate-limiting, engineered to the same bar as the model APIs themselves

Performance and reliability for a multi-tenant platform serving long-context agentic and coding workloads

Observability (logging, metrics, tracing), so the team can debug production confidently and quickly

Integration and load testing: the harness that lets us ship fast without breaking customer-facing APIs

Close partnership with the Inference and MLOps teams on production readiness for new model launches

Design-first, documentation-first engineering culture within the team: RFCs before code, decisions written down, no tribal knowledge

What We're Looking For

3+ years building production backend systems

Strong Python in production: asyncio, FastAPI or similar, and services you've built and operated under real load

Working knowledge of Go, or a strong willingness to learn it: you'll work in both languages through the rewrite

Experience building low-latency, multi-tenant backend services

Hands-on experience with streaming systems: SSE or WebSockets, long-lived connections, backpressure

Strong PostgreSQL and Redis fundamentals: schema design, query performance, caching, and rate limiting

Comfort running services on Kubernetes in production

An ownership mindset: you test before you ship, debug production with metrics, logs, and traces, and write the RCA afterwards

Bonus Points

Experience serving or integrating LLMs in production, especially OpenAI-compatible APIs

Familiarity with inference servers (vLLM, SGLang, Dynamo) and latency metrics such as time to first token and inter-token latency

Experience building metering, billing, or usage-based pricing 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.