Backend Engineer

Branch Overview
Branch is a leading AI-powered lending fintech with 50M+ downloads across India and Africa. We use alternative data and machine learning to expand financial access for millions of people traditionally excluded from the formal financial system. Founded by the former CEO of Kiva.org and backed by leading investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Visa, and the IFC, Branch combines mission-driven impact with world-class technology and scale.

In India, Branch operates as a regulated digital lending institution and Middle Layer NBFC, building trusted and accessible financial products for millions of customers across the country. Our 250+ member India team is growing rapidly and works across technology, data science, risk, product, and operations to solve high-impact problems at scale.

Certified as a Great Place to Work in 2025, Branch offers the opportunity to build meaningful careers while shaping the future of inclusive fintech in one of the world’s fastest-growing digital economies.

About the role

You will work closely with our Product, Operations, Compliance and Data Science teams to build and scale critical financial infrastructure across lending, KYC, payments, fraud prevention, and collections. The work spans backend platforms, decisioning and underwriting systems, third-party financial integrations, and internal operations tooling.

Our engineering team tackles a wide range of technical challenges from designing reliable, high-scale financial systems and orchestrating complex compliance workflows to leveraging alternative data and real-time signals to power intelligent risk and credit decisions.

As an engineering team, we value bottom-up innovation and decentralized decision-making: We believe the best ideas can come from anyone in the company, and we are working hard to create an environment where everyone feels empowered to propose solutions to the challenges we face. We are looking for individuals who thrive in a fast-moving, innovative, and customer-focused setting.

Responsibilities
- Design, build, and maintain customer-facing and internal products and APIs, following best practices around security, performance, reliability, and maintainability.
- Contribute to technical and product decisions by providing thoughtful input, raising trade-offs, and helping execute on agreed-upon solutions.
- Collaborate with engineers across functional areas (Android, Machine Learning, Data, DevOps, etc.) to support shared systems and identify opportunities for improvement.
- Participate in on-call rotations and operational work, helping diagnose issues, improve system reliability, and reduce future incidents.
- Continuously improve existing systems, by refactoring code, reducing technical debt, and improving developer productivity.

Qualifications
- You have 3–5 years of experience designing, coding, testing, and shipping backend software for web-based or mobile products.
- You have experience working closely with product managers, designers, and other engineers to deliver features and improvements aligned with business needs.
- You have a solid understanding of software development fundamentals, including computer science basics, data structures, APIs, databases, and modern development practices.
- You are able to write clean, maintainable, and well-tested code and ship quality software in a timely manner.
- You are comfortable learning and contributing across adjacent technical areas such as frontend, Android/iOS, DevOps, data, or infrastructure, as needed.
- You approach problems pragmatically, balancing technical correctness, product requirements, and delivery timelines to arrive at effective solutions.
- You take ownership of your work, proactively identifying issues, improving systems, and following through to completion with guidance when needed.
- You are a strong collaborator and communicator. You value feedback, contribute constructively to discussions, and work effectively