KDU 2027 - Software Developer

About Kickdrum Kickdrum is a software product engineering and technology advisory firm headquartered in Austin, Texas, with a dedicated engineering center in Bangalore, India, for the past eight years. Our team of enterprise-grade engineers, architects, and strategists has helped transform businesses across 100+ Fortune 500 companies. We are strategic partners to Private Equity firms and business leaders, providing full-spectrum services—from cloud transformations to product development and strategic hiring. We’ve assessed over $20B in transactions and helped our clients realize measurable outcomes. At Kickdrum, we grow future technology leaders and entrepreneurs by setting a high bar for software quality, ownership, and innovation. Software Developer We seek inquisitive, high-ownership problem solvers who can take on unfamiliar challenges, quickly learn what they need to know, reason from first principles, break complex problems into manageable parts, develop practical solutions, and communicate them clearly and concisely. Joining Date : January 2027 CTC (Post-Internship) : ₹17 LPA Internship Stipend : ₹35,000 per month Internship Duration : 6 months Eligibility Criteria:

• B.E./B.Tech in CS or IT
• Minimum 75% aggregate throughout academics
• No active backlogs As a Software Engineer at Kickdrum, you will:
• Own complex modules from the requirement through to a running feature that delivers real business impact.
• Build on scalable, high-performance cloud architectures and GenAI products.
• Apply design-driven development: reason from first principles, weigh trade-offs, and build for maintainability.
• Use AI throughout as a force multiplier, and own the correctness and quality of everything you ship.
• Estimate effort, surface technical risks early, and deliver MVPs on short timelines.
• Work alongside industry veterans and tech leaders. You’re a Great Fit if You:
• Take ownership. You drive your work forward, ask questions that could change what should be built, and own the outcome—not just the task.
• Think like an engineer. You make sense of unfamiliar code, plan before jumping in, weigh your options, and can explain the choices you make.
• Sweat the details. You're not done when it works; you care about clean code, edge cases, tests, and getting things genuinely right.
• Love solving hard problems and working through them systematically.
• Learn and adapt quickly. You're comfortable finding your way and adjusting when things change, and learning from feedback.
• Use AI well—and own what you ship with it. You use AI to move faster while verifying its output, understanding the code, and standing behind the result.
• Make your thinking easy to understand. You explain technical ideas clearly and concretely, without hiding behind jargon.
• Bring energy and curiosity , and enjoy building with collaborative, hybrid teams. What We Expect Technically:
• Strong programming fundamentals, including OOP, data structures, and core programming concepts.
• Good software design fundamentals — separation of concerns, modularity, low coupling, reuse, and the ability to spot and improve poorly structured code.
• Ability to write clean, readable, and maintainable code , with attention to correctness, edge cases, and testing.
• Working knowledge of full-stack development across frontend, backend, and SQL databases.
• Hands-on familiarity with a modern application-development framework or stack. The specific framework doesn't matter; we expect you to understand and apply the fundamentals behind it.
• Strong debugging and problem-solving fundamentals, including the ability to work through unfamiliar code and problems systematically. Interview Process 1. Online Assessment (C++/Java/Python)
• Conducted at the college campus
• College to provide lab and internet support 2. Video Screening Round 3. Technical Interviews (2 Rounds) Round 1 is a hands-on build round in a working application.
• Candidates who have built full-stack applications (on any tech stack) and can explain their own code will be well prepared. Practical preparation is to build a feature end to end, backend, frontend and database.
• Candidates work in a stack they are already familiar with. Supported stacks are:
• Backend: Java with Spring Boot, or Node.js with Express or NestJS
• Frontend: React
• Database: SQL (MySQL or PostgreSQL)
• Knowledge of a specific framework beyond the one you choose is not required. Familiarity with relational databases and SQL is expected, as the application is SQL-backed.
• What matters is full-stack exposure, not expertise in any one framework. If you have built end to end on any stack or another combination, you are in a good position to prepare, and you will work in one of the supported stacks above during the round.
• AI assistance is permitted in Round 1. Available tools are ChatGPT and Google in the browser. No AI-integrated IDE is provided. Candidates are expected to use AI effectively and to be able to explain and defend their code without it. Round 2 covers software design on a Java or C++ codebase, based on your choice.
• Candidates should be comfortable with object-oriented concepts and core design principles, and should be able to explain the reasoning behind design decisions. 3. Culture Round
• Final round to evaluate alignment with Kickdrum’s values, culture, and teamwork.