Staff Software Engineer - Frontend

About the job

ABOUT SARVAM

Sarvam is building the bedrock of Sovereign AI for India. The company is developing India's full-stack sovereign AI platform, building across research, models, infrastructure and applications with a singular focus on making AI genuinely work for India. Sarvam works with leading enterprises and public institutions and is backed by Lightspeed, Peak XV, and Khosla Ventures. Sarvam partners with India's leading brands, including Tata Capital, SBI Life, CRED, IDFC, and LIC.

About the Role

We are looking for a Staff Software Engineer - Frontend to help us solve some of the hardest frontend problems as we build AI products at scale.

This is a hands-on technical leadership role. You will work on problems involving real-time systems, streaming, performance, reliability, complex user workflows, and large-scale frontend architecture. You will also help shape the way frontend engineering is done across the organization.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

- Own the frontend architecture for complex, high-scale applications.

- Solve challenging problems around real-time interactions, streaming data, asynchronous workflows, and continuously changing UI state.

- Build reliable experiences around AI-generated responses, long-running tasks, tool calls, and partial results.

- Design systems that remain responsive and reliable when dealing with large amounts of data and long-running operations.

- Work closely with backend, product, and design teams to solve problems end to end.

- Identify architectural bottlenecks before they become scaling problems and drive the right long-term solutions.

- Improve frontend performance across loading, rendering, network usage, memory, and bundle size.

- Build reusable frontend infrastructure, components, and patterns that can be adopted across teams.

- Improve observability and production debugging through metrics, logging, error tracking, traces, and monitoring.

- Own complex production issues, identify root causes, and make sure the same problems don't keep coming back.

- Establish better approaches to testing, releases, feature flags, CI/CD, and frontend reliability.

- Lead architecture discussions and technical decisions across teams.

- Mentor engineers and help raise the overall frontend engineering bar.

- Take ambiguous problems from problem definition → design → implementation → production.

WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR

- 8+ years of software engineering experience, with strong hands-on frontend experience.

- Deep experience with JavaScript, TypeScript, React, and Next.js.

- Strong understanding of frontend architecture, browser fundamentals, networking, rendering, and the web platform.

- Experience designing and scaling large production frontend applications.

- Strong understanding of state management, APIs, caching, authentication, and asynchronous systems.

- Experience building real-time or streaming experiences using technologies such as WebSockets, SSE, or streaming APIs.

- Strong understanding of web performance and experience solving real production performance problems.

- Experience with frontend observability and debugging production issues.

- Experience building shared components, design systems, or frontend platforms.

- Strong system-design skills and the ability to make practical architectural trade-offs.

- Ability to influence technical decisions across teams without relying on formal authority.

- Strong ownership and a bias toward solving problems at their root.

- Understanding of video and audio fundamentals, including media processing, encoding/decoding, formats, streaming, synchronization, and handling media workflows at scale.

- Experience building frontend experiences for video/audio processing or dubbing workflows is highly valuable.

- Understanding of document digitization workflows, including document upload, processing states, previews, extraction results, editing/review experiences, and handling large or complex documents.

- Experience building frontend applications that deal with large files, long-running processing jobs, progress tracking, retries, failures, and partial results.