Software Engineer - Backend

About Us:

Markaz is on the mission to supercharge the rails of e-commerce for the common man in Pakistan. We want to empower the Pakistani middle class, with a special focus on women who are currently not part of the Pakistani financial ecosystem, and help establish hundreds of thousands of new online entrepreneurs in the coming years. We enable anyone in Pakistan to start their online business with zero investment from the comfort of their home and make money by selling products through different social media channels like WhatsApp and Facebook. All they have to do is download the Markaz app, get access to 1,000s of products, share them on their social media with a profit margin and get orders. Markaz will take care of everything else: delivery, payments, customer experience and profit dissemination. 

The start-up has been formed by 4 lifetime friends who have previously worked at organizations like Alipay, Amazon and Telenor and have a combined experience of 40+ years in fintech, product management, growth, marketing, e-commerce and technology. If you think our mission is inspiring, aligned with your goals and you want to be part of the founding team that will set up the next rocketship of Pakistan, then be extremely excited!

What Are Our Values:

At Markaz we believe that passion, skillset and the right attitude are extremely important but these attributes have no impact if you don’t feel like you’re part of a community that will take care of you and bring more smiles to your life. Our one and only focus is to build a team with a culture that is definitely a notch above the rest in Pakistan but also aspires to be one of the best in the region.

A day at Markaz will be full of exciting problem solving, taking initiatives, sharing your ideas, believing in breaking boundaries and combining fun with whatever you do. Our job would be to enable you to become the best version of yourself and help you achieve your own personal goals along with our mission!

Job Overview:

As a Software Engineer - Backend you will be working on building the best in class tech stack where you will work on web applications, libraries, services - basically developing anything and everything related to different customer facing and backend applications that we need for our products and services.

We are actively seeking candidates that are active in the local developer community. If you are an active member and contributor, please add your GitHub profile to your application.

Technical Skills Needed:

• Understanding of modern application designs for maximum reliability, security, performance with cost optimization.
• Understanding and experience with microservices architectures. In depth understanding of building reliable web services that are autonomous, de-coupled, reusable, etc.
• Hands-on experience in Python, nodeJs.
• Expert level skills in relational and NoSQL databases such as MySQL, Postgres, DynamoDB. The candidate should have adequate knowledge on use cases that the above databases work best for. Understanding of query optimization, query patterns and database optimization techniques for best performance.
• Have experience in designing common data models for data source and web services.
• Experience with Realtime data streaming technologies such as kafka and AWS Kinesis services.
• Understanding of logging architectures using ElasticSearch, Logstash and Kibana (ELK), but open to other architectures and suggestions.
• Hands-on experience with CI/CD pipelines for automated testing and deployment of applications using GitHub Actions, AWS CodePipeline.
• Must have a good understanding of modern architectures such as microservices, event driven and self-healing architectures.
• Experience in developing REST APIs with authentication and additional security considerations.
• Understanding of Infrastructure as Code (IaC) such as cloudformation and Serverless Application Model (AWS SAM). Hands on experience would be a plus.
  

Minimum Qualifications:

• 1 - 3 years of experience in software engineering, infrastructure architecture, or DevOps technologies. 
• Strong scripting, object-oriented design, or coding skills
• Demonstrated ability to adapt to new technologies and learn quickly
• Demonstrated experience building solutions involving public cloud platform and on-premises technologies
• Experience with AWS cloud platform would be a plus
  
• Willingness to get things done
• Excellent oral and written communication skills
  

What We Offer:

• A culture that empowers you everyday to take charge and deliver outstanding results
• An absolutely power-packed all hands on team that helps you become the best version of yourself
• We believe in taking care of you and your mental well-being. 
  
• We let you explore new avenues, work on your own ideas and deliver with utmost autonomy
• We offer excellent rewards based on merit and a flexible work environment 
• We offer healthy compensation with and a stock options plan to take care of yourself and your families