Lead Software Engineer

About Orenda

Orenda is a fintech-enabled financial services company founded in 2017 and based in Ahmedabad, Gujarat. We work as a corporate DSA and channel partner for leading banks and NBFCs, helping individuals, professionals, and MSMEs access suitable financial solutions across business loans, personal loans, home loans, loan against property, and professional loans.

At Orenda, we combine financial expertise, technology, and streamlined processes to simplify the lending journey. We are building our own lending-tech platform to improve operational efficiency, strengthen lender and partner integrations, and develop technology-driven solutions that support our evolving business needs.

About the role

We're looking for a Lead Software Engineer who enjoys building as much as designing. You'll shape how our systems are architected, write a good share of the code yourself, and lead a team of 3 to 5 engineers, including AI/ML engineers.

This is a hands-on leadership role, not a pure management or architecture position. Your time will be roughly split like this

Share of time

Leading the team ~30%

Solution design ~30%

Hands-on coding ~30%

Deployment and infrastructure~10%

What you'll work on

Solution design and architecture

• Turning business needs into technical designs that are practical to build and easy to maintain
• Making architecture decisions across services, integrations and data flows
• Estimating, scoping and planning new features with business and product stakeholders
• Shaping the solution design for AI/ML use cases alongside the AI/ML engineers

Engineering and delivery

• Writing production code in Python and Node.js
• Rolling out new features across our internal and partner-facing platforms, including our CRM and partner portal
• Continuously improving existing systems for performance, reliability and code quality
• Reviewing code and setting engineering standards for the team

Infrastructure and cloud

• Maintaining and upgrading our infrastructure, including a planned move to a major cloud platform
• Owning deployments and production stability together with the team
• Working with event-driven and messaging systems (NATS today, Kafka planned)

Team leadership

• Leading and mentoring a team of 3 to 5 engineers
• Planning and prioritising work, unblocking the team, and making sure things ship
• Building a culture of ownership, clear documentation and quality

What we're looking for

• 5 to 8 years of software engineering experience, with hands-on coding in your recent roles
• Strong command of Python and Node.js
• Proven experience designing and building backend systems and microservices that run in production
• Hands-on experience deploying and running workloads on at least one major cloud platform (AWS, Azure or GCP)
• Solid working knowledge of PostgreSQL
• Experience with messaging or event streaming systems such as NATS, Kafka or RabbitMQ
• Experience leading or mentoring a small engineering team
• Comfort estimating effort, breaking down features and planning delivery
• Enough understanding of AI/ML systems to guide their solution design and integration
• Clear communication with both technical and non-technical stakeholders

Good to have

• Experience working at a fintech, lending or financial services company
• Hands-on experience with Kafka
• Experience leading an infrastructure upgrade or cloud migration
• Experience building or scaling CRM or partner-facing portal products

Why Join Us?

Build a growing lending-tech platform: Play a key role in shaping the technology behind a growing financial services business.

Own technical decisions

Contribute directly to architecture, engineering standards, and technology direction.

Stay hands-on

Combine solution design and technical leadership with meaningful coding responsibilities.

Work with emerging technologies: Collaborate with AI/ML engineers and contribute to evolving platform capabilities.

Lead and grow a team

Mentor engineers and help build a strong engineering culture as the technology function scales.

Make a measurable impact

Build systems that improve operational efficiency and support business growth.