Forward Deployed Engineer

Skills this role screens for

About the role

Razorpay is one of India’s leading full-stack financial technology companies, powering the way businesses move, manage, and grow money. Founded in 2014 by Harshil Mathur and Shashank Kumar with a simple vision - to simplify payments for Indian businesses - we’ve since grown into a fintech powerhouse driving India’s digital payment revolution.

Razorpay powers millions of businesses with a smarter, scalable stack that goes beyond transactions to help them truly build and grow.

From building AI-native agentic payments, to AI-assisted fraud detection and real-time risk intelligence to automated reconciliation, smart payouts, and predictive financial insights, we are embedding intelligence across our stack to make money movement faster, safer, and more efficient. In close collaboration with ecosystem partners - including banks, networks, regulators - we are pioneering industry-first solutions that are shaping the next era of fintech

Across India, Singapore and Malaysia, our products span everything from seamless checkouts to payroll automation - powering a fintech ecosystem that’s redefining how money moves across Asia.

Today, that ecosystem supports everyone from early-stage startups to some of India’s largest enterprises, enabling them to accept, process, and disburse payments at scale while expanding into new ways of managing money more efficiently.

Our scale speaks volumes: Razorpay processes $180+ billion in annualized transactions, powering leading businesses like Airbnb, Facebook, WhatsApp, Airtel, CRED, BookmyShow, Zomato, Swiggy, Lenskart, Mirae Asset Capital markets, Indian Oil, National Pension Scheme - and over 100 of India’s unicorns. With strong roots in India and growing operations in Southeast Asia, we are shaping the next chapter of financial technology across the region.

We are backed by global investors including GIC, Peak XV Partners (formerly Sequoia Capital India & SEA), Tiger Global, Ribbit Capital, Matrix Partners, MasterCard, and Salesforce Ventures, having raised over $740 million to date. Strategic acquisitions - including Ezetap (POS and offline payments), Curlec (Malaysia expansion), BillMe (digital invoicing), and POP (rewards-first UPI) - along with earlier moves in fraud prevention, payroll, and lending, have further strengthened our platform and widened our footprint across Asia.

But what truly sets Razorpay apart is our culture. At Razorpay, ownership is our oxygen - you own what you build, with no micromanagement or red tape, just the runway to make your ideas fly. Learning is a lifestyle - if you’re curious, you’ll feel at home here. People > Pedigree - we hire for attitude, hustle, and hunger more than degrees. Transparency thrives over titles - this is where interns question CXOs and CXOs say “thank you.” Guided by our values of Customer First, Autonomy & Ownership, Agility with Integrity, Transparency, Challenging the status quo and a strong belief that Razorpay grows with Razors, you’ll be part of a 3000+ strong team building not just products, but the financial infrastructure of the future.

The one-line version: You are a senior engineer embedded with one of Razorpay's largest merchants. You own their technical success end-to-end — from solutioning to go-live — and you do it with a stack of AI agents working alongside you. You are not a consultant, not a support engineer, not a solutions architect. You build, you ship, you own.

The work

About the role

Razorpay's most strategic merchants — Nvidia, Airbnb, Meta, Shopify, and others — don't want a vendor. They want a partner/team who understands payments deeply, sits with their team, and makes their use cases work. That team comprises a Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE).

An FDE owns one merchant's technical destiny. You take a vague business ask and turn it into a concrete technical plan, then build and ship it — using both Razorpay's platform and our internal AI agents to move faster than any traditional team could. When you build something useful for one merchant, you feed the pattern back so the whole platform gets better.

This is modelled on the role pioneered by Palantir and now run at OpenAI, Anthropic, Databricks and Ramp — adapted for payments, and built AI-native from day one.

The work

What you will do

• Own a merchant's technical success. You are the single engineering face the merchant sees. No "let me check with the team" handoffs.
• Scope and solution. Sit with the merchant's engineering and business teams, understand the real problem, and define a clear technical plan — ideally before the contract is signed.
• Build and ship. Write and review production code — in Razorpay's systems, and where allowed, in the merchant's repo. Custom flows, SDK integration, orchestration logic, server-to-server hooks.
• Use AI agents at full strength. Lean on coding agents for routine PRs, knowledge agents for merchant context, and routing agents for incident triage. You are expected to be the most AI-leveraged engineer in the org.
• Feed the platform. When you build the same thing for 2+ merchants, take the pattern back to the product pods with a clear write-up.
• Keep the merchant informed. Run a regular progress cadence. Acknowledge merchant-raised issues within 2 hours. Never go silent.

Who they want

What we are looking for

We hire for a "T-shaped" profile — deep engineering, broad execution. Roughly:

Weight

Area

What we expect

~50%

Engineering

Strong, hands-on coder. Python and one of Java/Go/TypeScript. Production-grade code, not prototypes.

~30%

Systems & deployment

APIs, webhooks, integration patterns, cloud (AWS/GCP), debugging across distributed systems. Comfort with payments flows is a strong plus.

~20%

Communication & ownership

Can explain a complex system to a non-technical merchant lead. Turns vague asks into clear specs. Owns problems end-to-end without being told.

Also

Must-haves

• SDE2+ level (4+ years for senior; exceptional candidates with less considered)
• Demonstrated end-to-end ownership — you have shipped something real, start to finish, ideally with customer contact
• Fluency with AI coding tools and agents — you already use them daily and can show how they multiply your output
• Comfort with ambiguity — you have worked without a clear spec and made progress anyway
• Hands-on solutions architect or data/ML engineer background with real shipping experience

Also

Why this role is worth it

This role is not for everyone. It is for engineers who want depth, customer proximity, autonomy, and high stakes. If you want pure platform work with no customer contact, this is not it — and that is fine.

Razorpay believes in and follows an equal employment opportunity policy that doesn't discriminate on gender, religion, sexual orientation, colour, nationality, age, etc. We welcome interests and applications from all groups and communities across the globe.

Follow us on LinkedIn & Twitter

• You will understand payments more deeply than almost anyone in India within two years.
• You will ship to production faster than anyone in the org — no five-team approval chains.
• You will have Senior leadership level visibility from day one, at Razorpay and at the merchant.
• You will be the most AI-leveraged engineer in the company, by design.