Senior Software Engineer - Desktop (Rust/Tauri)

Read AI, Inc.•Seattle, WA

22h•$180,000 - $220,000

About The Position

At Read AI, we are redefining team collaboration by bringing intelligence to every conversation. Our platform enhances productivity across meetings, messages, and email, enabling faster, smarter, and more focused work. We integrate with tools like Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, and Slack to keep teams aligned, regardless of their location. Backed by $81 million in funding, Read AI is experiencing significant growth, and we are looking for individuals excited to shape the future of AI-powered collaboration and make a tangible impact at a product-focused startup. The role focuses on our desktop application, which currently captures meeting audio and provides transcripts and reports. The vision is to transform this application into the central hub for Read meetings, facilitating preparation, capture, and outcome generation within a unified experience. The application is built using Rust with Tauri, featuring a React frontend. The most challenging aspects involve the integration with the operating system, including system audio capture across different permission and device models, on-device processing, connections to external hardware for enhanced capture quality, and maintaining the health of installed software on user machines. This position offers the opportunity to work directly with product and design teams to deliver roadmap features and contribute to critical research and development that defines our capabilities. A key part of the role involves identifying and demonstrating what is achievable on the local machine, leveraging capabilities not available through web or mobile platforms.

Requirements

5+ years of professional software development experience, with significant time spent on desktop or client applications.
Experience shipping installed software to users on Windows, macOS, or both, and supporting it post-launch.
Working proficiency in Rust, or deep systems experience in a comparable language with a strong interest in learning Rust.
Comfort working across the native/web boundary, including React and TypeScript.
Practical knowledge of OS-level concerns such as permissions, device access, background processes, packaging, and distribution.
Authorized to work in the US.

Nice To Haves

Audio capture, DSP, or real-time media pipeline experience.
Experience with Tauri or comparable hybrid frameworks.
On-device ML or local inference work.
Hardware or peripheral integration experience.

Responsibilities

Build the unified desktop experience, shipping features that create a seamless flow for preparing, capturing, and reviewing meetings.
Implement the desktop component of our cross-app UI unification to ensure a consistent look and behavior across all Read products.
Create a cohesive user experience that minimizes complexity, allowing users to focus on achieving their desired outcomes.
Own the native layer, expanding meeting capture capabilities across both Windows and macOS as first-class platforms.
Investigate and prototype on-device transcription and audio processing.
Collect additional signals to enhance our AI capabilities.
Connect to external devices to improve capture quality.
Elevate the codebase quality by writing maintainable Rust code with clear structure, robust tests, and durable interfaces.
Establish patterns and conventions that ensure the codebase is productive for both engineers and AI agents.
Manage release quality end-to-end, including signing, notarization, auto-updates, and crash telemetry.
Contribute technical vision to roadmap discussions, identifying unique desktop capabilities.
Partner with product and design teams from the initial problem definition phase.
Influence team shipping processes, utilizing AI to enhance efficiency and rigor.