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Lead Product Engineer
4 years ago
Mech Mocha runs India's first vernacular social gaming platform for the next billion Indians. Let’s take you through our journey.
2015: Bangalore touchdown. We started small but with a big dream - to build mobile apps that entertain India.
Early Wins In no time, we evolved into a dynamic 30+ member team and our first game got over 10 Million downloads. Got Blume to invest in our adventure.
Bigwigs came onboard. We raised over $10 million in funding, thanks to industry stalwarts like Accel, Blume and Shunwei and grew to 50+ awesome people!
Making India Play. Our users, who we lovingly call ‘Pritam’ or 'Preeti', are spending over 70 million minutes of time per month on our platforms.
With Jio's aggressive entry, mobile data became affordable to additional hundreds of millions. These hundreds of millions of Indians are under-served w.r.t. digital products and services competing for their attention. Over the next 5 years, 500 million more Indians are expected to adopt digital platforms.
Their online behaviour is different from the behaviour of the audience in tier-1 India. For them, typing is an *unnatural* way of interacting with the smartphone. They're not as comfortable with English-first apps; they strongly prefer to consume online content in vernacular languages.
These users' way of looking at mobile games is quite interesting. It might be a shopkeeper in Lucknow, or a beauty salon employee in Jodhpur. They spend 12-14 hours a day at work, and have a lot of time alone- especially in the afternoon.
Hello Play allows them an escape mechanism from societal constraints, and they get a *human* connection with real people from across India with similar interests. We provide the most entertaining way of discovering new people and creating deep relationships. The product fulfils the innate need of human connection and the natural attraction towards entertainment through gaming.
We've observed during our 12 hour+ train journeys that co-travellers, who are strangers to each other, play a game of cards or Ludo to pass time. We've met a lot of interesting people this way ourselves, which makes us strongly believe in games as some of the best ice-breakers.
India’s first live social gaming platform where users meet new people through live social games
- 30+ minutes of in-app time spent by each user daily
- Over 100 million+ minutes of conversations on the platform since launch
About the Engineering team at Mech Mocha
Engineering at Mech Mocha closely works with the product team to achieve the overall outcome. Our engineers own their impact end-to-end. While solving key technical & scaling challenges, they contribute to the overall roadmap, enabling product experiments, turnkey deliverables and more. Our user feedback loop is immediate, which means we can rapidly iterate and deploy. High interaction with cross-functional peers.
- We love versatility in our engineers. Jack of all trades, master of none is often better than master of one.
- Communication and collaboration across the organization are as important as an engineer’s execution and delivery.
- We believe that the best engineers write simple codes for complex problems.
- We focus on details before deliverables. Premature execution is the root of all scope creep!
What you will do
- Backend system development : Writing edge as-well-as core microservices, such as, for Over-the-air content delivery, Leaderboards, Wallets, Feed, Friends, Presence etc.
- Backend infrastructure development : Load testing, Container and node orchestration and automation, Observability and trace tools, Infrastructure cost optimization and so on.
- Android application development : Creating Screens and navigation flows. Adding notifications and deep linking. Social Login, Invite, Referral and so on.
- Multiplayer system development : Matchmaking, Shared game state signalling, Audio chat, Video chat, Live Streaming, Bots and so on.
- Data Engineering : We are working on applications and systems that will use data science primitives. We aren't a data science company at our core which will build a research team of scientists who train models and generate piecemeal incremental improvements for our bottom line. We expect engineering applications that apply data science tools to achieve use cases such as
- Finding abusive behaviour in a video chat
- Modulating video parameters based on ambient noise / network conditions
- Predicting churn and ensuring that users will stay by pitching offers to them
- Automating customer support emails / chat
- Optimising revenue versus churn probability via running large number of experiments simultaneously (which is not possible by humans)
- Web scraping and presentation for easing content production
- Matchmaking new users to veterans (and measuring impact on churn)
Besides data science, Mech Mocha deals with data boldly and regularly. We collect 100s of millions of hits every month and build ETL jobs to warehouse several hundred GBs per month. Our product analysts are expected to visualize data for daily consumption, as well as, deep dive into data through SQL and R for product deep dives.
Some examples include
- Finding
cheaters who work around gameplay rules of CBZ and gain advantage.
- Identifying key performance measures for what leads to long term retained users by behavioural cohorting.
Will I work on building games ?
Mech Mocha has a gaming DNA, but we have evolved into a platform company. Our product and engineering teams are building a platform in native android, systems and APIs in Golang / Postgres / Redis etc. Our product engineering team today concentrates on developing platform features such as leaderboards, wallets, tournament scheduling systems, interactive livestream experiences and so on. Coming from gaming DNA does mean that we offer gaming experience to our users including games that Pritam likes such as Ludo, Carrom, Pool and Tambola.
While we don't plan to make a MOBA anytime soon, you will get amazing exposure to full-stack native mobile application development in an environment that places tremendous amount of focus on contributing to backend as well as front-end at all levels of experience.
Tech Stack :
Programming languages and technologies we use every day include Java, Kotlin, Golang, Python, SQL, Javascript, Android, Postgres, Redis, Docker, Kubernetes, Firebase and BigQuery.
What we are looking for :
- Relevant experience : 4-5 years of experience building online mobile applications and services
- Experience with application and system development in a relevant domain
- Authority over one or more object-oriented modern programming languages
- Strong computer science fundamentals and problem solving skills
- Strong design fundamentals. Ability to independently break down complex real-world problems without needing help.
- Strong system design fundamentals. Ability to identify and drive requirements in server side as-well-as client side for building features.
- Solid mentoring and team organisation skills
- Ability to take charge of delivering multiple efforts. You have the leadership quality of guiding and inspiring everyone in the team.
- Prior experience of interacting with product managers and business stakeholders directly
- A deep sense of ownership and collaboration – take initiative to communicate and clarify, breakdown tasks, burn-down task lists, work hard, learn and unlearn
- Great written and oral communication skill - write design documents, constructively comment on code reviews, pair with design and test teams to tackle technical unknowns
Brownie points for :
- You have debugged performance bottlenecks in mobile applications and fixed them.
- You don't need a DevOps guy to setup your server.
- Experience with H5 game engines.
- Experience working in teams building microservices.
- Experience managing a few direct reports.
- Experience at an online consumer or entertainment company.
Our building blocks
- Unstoppable drive: Visible energy. Initiative. Follow through.
- High ownership: Capability. Responsibility. Accountability.
- Effective communication: Unhindered by ambiguity. Driving clarity. Alignment. Thoughtful communication.
- Infectious positive energy: Fostering creativity. Encouraging and listening to others' ideas. Guidance, not criticism.
- Agile execution: Shipping early. Quick critical feedback. Fast iteration.
- User empathy: Knowledge of the targeted users. Deep respect for everything about them.
Why join us
- Flat organization- No bureaucracy, zero politics
- Small teams, big goals- Individual ownership, high visibility
- Learn and grow- Face-to-face sessions with industry leaders, accomplished founders, renowned designers
- Competitive compensation- Attractive package, generous equity, relocation bonus
- Interest-free loans- Looking to rent a house? We’d be happy to help out with the deposit!
- Work hard, party harder- Fun get-togethers, annual off-sites
- Eat. Repeat- There’s always food in the house
- Women in leadership- We believe in maintaining gender balance in our space and have women occupying over 50% of leadership roles.
- Outcome driven culture- We measure work by the impact it creates on the users, and not by the number of hours.
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