Founding Platform Engineer

SourceIn • San Francisco, CA

4d

About The Position

The Founding Platform Engineer will be the first senior engineer at an early-stage AI startup building an AI monitoring and assurance platform for enterprise customer conversations. Working directly with the CTO, this hands-on technical leader will own platform architecture, write production code, and establish engineering foundations and culture for future growth. The platform evaluates AI-powered interactions across voice, chat, email, and SMS against regulations and business requirements, helping enterprises identify issues, reduce risk, and demonstrate accountability.

The role spans scalable multi-tenant SaaS architecture, backend and distributed systems, conversation-processing pipelines and integrations, voice-processing capabilities, auditability and data provenance, infrastructure and operational excellence, reliability and performance, and enterprise security readiness. The engineer will help evolve the platform from early pilots toward processing millions of interactions per month.

Requirements

• Experience operating at Staff, Principal, or equivalent scope, owning critical production systems and setting technical direction for other engineers.
• Strong backend and distributed-systems expertise, including high-volume data processing, event-driven architectures, API design, and data modelling.
• Hands-on experience building infrastructure as code, CI/CD, and observability capabilities.
• Early-stage or high-growth startup experience shipping products amid ambiguity, broad ownership, and limited support functions; this is described as essential.
• Strong Python skills and experience building production-grade backend systems.
• Enough TypeScript and React experience to contribute to the product portal when needed.
• Fluency with ML systems topics, including model evaluation, deployment, monitoring, accuracy, latency, and inference costs.
• Enterprise SaaS experience and understanding of multi-tenancy, tenant isolation, access controls, and customer-specific entitlements.
• Comfort using coding agents, including Claude Code, while maintaining standards for code quality, testing, security, and maintainability.
• Hands-on technical leadership and willingness to take ownership beyond writing code.

Nice To Haves

• Experience with auditability, data provenance, or compliance-grade systems.
• Experience with speech and audio processing, including ASR, diarisation, streaming transcription, or real-time systems.
• Experience with contact-centre technology, CCaaS, quality assurance, or workforce optimisation.
• Experience with governance, risk and compliance (GRC) platforms or regulated enterprise environments.

Responsibilities

• Design and build backend systems for a scalable, multi-tenant SaaS platform, including APIs, data models, and distributed processing architecture.
• Make technical decisions that shape the platform as the company grows.
• Build pipelines that transform raw conversations into structured, enriched, and scorable data.
• Develop integrations with contact-centre platforms, ticketing systems, and direct-upload workflows.
• Help evolve voice-processing architecture, including transcription and audio ingestion.
• Implement immutable versioning for scoring rubrics and configurations, tamper-evident audit trails, and evidence preservation throughout the conversation lifecycle.
• Ensure historical results can be reproduced and explained, including the basis for an interaction's original score.
• Own infrastructure as code, CI/CD, environment management, and deployment workflows.
• Establish observability, logging, metrics, tracing, alerting, secrets management, and disaster recovery.
• Take responsibility for production reliability, incident response, and operational readiness.
• Build reliable data storage, retention, and queueing systems.
• Implement idempotent processing and reprocessing to prevent duplicate work and unnecessary AI inference costs.
• Define service-level objectives and help scale the platform from early pilots to millions of interactions per month.
• Build tenant isolation, permissions, customer-specific configuration, and entitlements into the platform.
• Implement sensitive-data handling and redaction before conversations reach AI models.
• Support evidence exports, SOC 2 readiness, and enterprise security reviews.
• Work directly with the CTO and help establish technical standards and foundations for future engineers.

Benefits

• Opportunity to work directly with the CTO and influence platform architecture from day one.
• Ownership of systems, infrastructure, and engineering practices rather than inheriting established processes.
• Opportunity to work on enterprise AI customer-support accountability, transparency, and assurance.
• Broad engineering scope across backend systems, cloud infrastructure, data pipelines, security, and product-facing functionality.
• Opportunity to establish technical standards and foundations for future engineers.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed