Senior Platform Engineer

Rifa AI

12d • $150,000 - $300,000

About The Position

Rifa AI is building the AI agents platform for contact centers in regulated industries. Enterprises in these industries want AI agents handling their customer operations and mostly can't deploy them. It's not a model problem. Horizontal platforms lack governance, release processes, and change management, and in a domain where every call can be reviewed by a regulator, that's disqualifying. Building an AI agent has never been easier. Deploying one an enterprise can trust has never been harder. That harder problem is the one we work on. Our platform turns a company's written procedures into AI agents: voicebots that hold real-time conversations, take actions in the client's CRM, and stay within the limits the client has set. Every release is gated by an automated testing suite, and every conversation feeds a post-analysis platform. We're live in production today, handling debt collection calls for US financial services clients. The engineering convictions behind it: evaluation methodology, not model capability, is the bottleneck. Every rule and decision trace becomes part of a company's context graph. Observability goes beyond logging. And our Agent Studio lets engineers, non-engineers, and auditors collaborate to build and improve AI agents with the right guardrails to achieve the expected business outcomes. Rifa was founded by Sameer Fulzele (IIT Bombay). We're a small team of exceptionally capable, passionate engineers with paying enterprise clients and growing revenue, backed by Seaborne Capital, a founder-first firm of exceptional industry operators that works closely with its founders, and by angel investors who are veterans of enterprise software and operators in the accounts receivable industry.

Requirements

• 5+ years of hands-on experience building and operating production systems, with strong backend and distributed systems fundamentals.
• Proven experience with cloud platforms, infrastructure as code, and container orchestration: you've run Kubernetes in production, not just in a tutorial.
• Real-time systems depth: you understand latency budgets, streaming, backpressure, and what makes a live audio conversation different from a request-response API.
• Experience with observability tooling (SigNoz, OpenTelemetry, or similar) and with incident response: you've been paged, found root cause, and made the pager quieter afterward.
• Pride in building reliable, maintainable, and secure systems that scale, and the judgment to know when boring technology is the right answer.
• High agency: you drive outcomes in a high-autonomy environment, find creative ways around obstacles, and don't wait to be told what matters.
• Degree in computer science or a related field, or equivalent professional experience.

Nice To Haves

• Experience building enterprise features: SSO, RBAC, IAM, audit logs, data isolation, or compliance-adjacent systems
• Production experience with LLMs, agent frameworks, retrieval, or evaluation systems
• Telephony or streaming audio experience: Twilio, WebRTC, SIP, or contact center integrations
• Experience with large-scale data systems, analytics platforms, or ML-powered product features
• Experience building developer platforms, SDKs, or internal tooling other engineers love
• Leadership experience on technical projects or teams

Responsibilities

• Build the agent platform primitives. Design and evolve the runtime, orchestration engine, and the systems behind Agent Studio: how agents are defined from written procedures, how they reason and take actions, and how guardrails make out-of-bounds behavior impossible rather than unlikely. Agent development is an evolution of software development, and you'll be building the tools it requires.
• Own the voice infrastructure. Real-time audio streaming over WebSockets, STT and TTS integration at low latency, and the hard parts of live conversation: interruptions, disconnects, transfers, and telephony integrations that pick up and place calls reliably at growing volume.
• Form the foundation of enterprise trust. Clients hand us regulated conversations with their own customers. You'll build and uphold the capabilities that make that possible: RBAC, access management, audit logs, data isolation, and integrations that embed into complex client environments while surviving their security reviews.
• Build the evaluation layer. We believe evaluation methodology, not model capability, is the bottleneck, and you'll own the system that proves it: the DeepEval-driven suite that replays real conversations against every change, simulation of the scenarios we haven't seen yet, and experimentation frameworks that let us A/B test agent behavior and make changes with evidence instead of intuition. Every release gates on what you build here.
• Build the observability layer. Observability goes beyond logging. You'll extend Reflect so that every agent decision is traceable: what the system knew at each moment, which instructions the model was given, and why it responded the way it did. Add proactive monitoring that surfaces regressions, drift, and new conversation patterns before a client notices, and turn millions of calls into insight the whole company acts on.
• Close the feedback loop. Connect what evaluation and observability find back into how agents improve: recurring failure modes become new eval cases, production patterns reshape procedures, and agents get measurably better over time.
• Keep the platform fast, reliable, and boring to operate. Own Kubernetes, ArgoCD-driven GitOps deployments, CI/CD, and observability with SigNoz. Build the self-serve infrastructure that lets the rest of engineering ship without waiting on you, and lead incident response and postmortems when things break.

Benefits

• Small teams, real ownership. You'll have peers to pair with and review your work, and you'll review theirs. We review all code, we write things down, and we'd rather hear an honest "I don't know yet" than a confident wrong answer.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: Associate degree