Senior Software Engineer (Dapr OSS) – India Lead

WHO WE ARE

We believe that open-source software, open standards and APIs are the greatest transformational tools for organizations in the modern software development era.

Our mission at the company is to provide developers with APIs and tools that help them focus on their code and not on infrastructure. As online digital services need to handle more load and run on multiple clouds or on-premises environments, programming to higher level abstractions delivers consistent, secure and reliable code that is easily portable and helps organizations de-risk their projects.

The company is founded by the creators of the Dapr [link for members] and KEDA [link for members] open-source projects, and who led the user experience, design and development of hyper-scale infrastructure cloud services, serverless platforms and open-source projects at Microsoft. Dapr has now achieved graduated status within the CNCF, joining renowned projects like Kubernetes, Prometheus, and Istio.

We are backed by top VC firms and supported with industry leading investors and advisors including Joe Beda (Kubernetes Co-Founder, former Co-Founder / CTO at Heptio) Matt Klein (Creator of Envoy, Lyft), Mark Russinovich (CTO, Microsoft Azure), William Morgan (Creator of Linkerd, CEO Buoyant), Seth Vargo (Senior Staff Engineer, Google), Adam Gross (Former CEO, Heroku), Sri Viswanath (Former CTO, Atlassian), Adam Frankl (Dev Marketing Expert, Neo4J & JFrog), and Roopak Venkatakrishnan (Head of platforms, Bolt).

About Dapr

Dapr [link for members] (Distributed Application Runtime) is a graduated CNCF project that helps developers build distributed, cloud-native applications. It gives them APIs for the hard parts: durable workflows, actors, service invocation, state, pub/sub, scheduled jobs and secure service-to-service communication. Dapr runs in production at companies such as Zeiss, IBM, NASA, Bosch and Lufthansa.

About the role

You join the company's Runtime team, the engineers who build Dapr and run it inside the company Catalyst. Your work lands in public, in the Dapr open source project, and in the product our customers run in production.

You will design and ship features in the Dapr runtime, review code from the community and from your team, and help keep releases stable. Much of the current work is in durable execution (Dapr Workflows, actors and the scheduler), where correctness under failure matters more than speed.

We build with AI every day. We look for engineers who use AI to go further and who check what it produces: you read the diff, you test the failure path, and you own the result, whoever or whatever wrote the first draft. In an open source project, reviewing and verifying code matters as much as writing it.

You are a full member of the team: the same ownership, the same voice in design, and the same chance to grow into a Dapr maintainer as everyone else.

Working hours

The company's team works across Europe and North America.

Our India team’s day typically starts around 12:00 PM IST, with afternoons overlapping Europe and evenings overlapping the US. You’ll need to be available for a core US overlap window of 8:30 PM to 12:00 AM IST; outside that, you can structure your day flexibly.

What you will do

• Design and build features in the Dapr runtime, from proposal to release.

• Review pull requests from the community and from your team. Hold the bar on correctness, tests and API design.

• Find and fix bugs in distributed code: race conditions, retries, partial failures, and state that must survive a crash.

• Write proposals and design docs in public, and respond to review on them.

• Take part in Dapr releases: release candidates, patch releases and security fixes.

• Help users and contributors on GitHub and Discord, and mentor new contributors.

What we look for

• 5+ years of professional Go, with production code you can explain line by line.

• Experience designing and running distributed systems. You know how they fail, and you design for it.

• 2+ years with Kubernetes and containers.

• A strong computer science base: concurrency, networking and data consistency.

• Daily, practical use of AI coding tools, and the judgment to check their output before you ship it.

• Clear written English. Most of our work happens in GitHub issues, pull requests and design docs, read by people across many companies and time zones.

Leading in India

You’ll be our first engineer in India, and you’ll help build the team that follows. Engineers who join in India will report to technical managers on their own teams, with a dotted line to you. Their managers own their day-to-day work and performance; you’re their local lead and point of contact.

• Help hire the India team: shape the hiring process, interview candidates and help us find the right people.

• Onboard new engineers and help them become productive in Dapr, our codebase and how we work.

• Be the go-to person in India for questions, feedback and support, and raise issues to their managers when needed.

• Build a strong engineering culture in India that matches how we work across the company: ownership, quality and working in the open.

• Work with leadership on India-specific topics such as hiring plans, working hours and team setup.

• Represent the company in the local engineering and open source community, through meetups, conferences and contributor outreach.

This role stays hands-on. Most of your time goes to engineering work on the runtime, and the leadership side grows as the team does.

Bonus

• Merged contributions to open source Go projects, especially CNCF projects.

• Experience as a maintainer of an open source project.

• Experience with Dapr, or with workflow and durable execution engines (Temporal, Azure Durable Functions, AWS Step Functions).

• gRPC and Protocol Buffers.

• One of the other languages Dapr has SDKs for: Java, Python, JavaScript, .NET or Rust.

#LI-Remote

The company BENEFITS

• Competitive compensation

• Company equity

• Remote first & flexible work environment

• Flexible paid time off

• Comprehensive healthcare for you and your dependents

• Choice of hardware

• $1000 for home office setup

• Monthly WFH stipend

• Team events & gatherings

• Chance to collaborate with industry-leading figures

The company, Inc. is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, non-disqualifying physical or mental disability, national origin, veteran status, or any other basis covered by appropriate law. All employment is decided on the basis of qualifications, merit, and business need. We embrace and celebrate differences and diversity.