Software Engineer, Agents
Cartesia•San Francisco, CA
•$180,000 - $250,000•Onsite
About The Position
Cartesia is hiring a Software Engineer, Agents to build the backend platform behind Line, our voice agents product. The Agents stack — a Go API with Python workers — is what customers rely on to run real-time, production-grade voice agents. You'll own backend work end-to-end and directly shape the latency, reliability, and developer experience of every agent built on Cartesia.
Requirements
- 3+ years building distributed backend systems in production, ideally at a high-growth startup. We care more about what you've shipped than strict YOE.
- Strong product instincts for platform work - you think in customer-facing latency, reliability, and developer experience, and you have opinions on what to build and why.
- Second-order thinking about backend architecture - you can explain why a design choice was made and what it trades off.
- Fluent, day-to-day use of AI coding tools, and a habit of keeping pace with the frontier.
- A strong communicator with both technical and non-technical audiences; comfortable writing clear specs and contributing actively in design reviews.
Nice To Haves
- Experience with Go and/or Python in a backend platform context.
- Realtime media systems in production (WebRTC, SIP, RTP, low-latency audio)
- Deep experience with cloud and infra primitives (Kubernetes, Docker, NATS, gRPC, OpenTelemetry and modern observability stacks).
- Distributed systems at scale dealing with non-trivial throughput, autoscaling, multi-region architectures.
- Voice agents or agent framework experience (Pipecat, LiveKit, OpenAI Agents SDK, Claude SDK, Vercel AI SDK).
Responsibilities
- Build and operate the distributed systems behind Cartesia's voice agents: load balancing servers, workers, and the realtime media pipelines that tie them together.
- Take projects from spec to production: design, build, ship, monitor, iterate.
- Make the architectural calls that compound over time — latency budgets, reliability targets, scaling primitives — and clearly articulate the tradeoffs.
- Define the developer experience for engineers building on Cartesia: APIs, observability, and applied evaluations.
Benefits
- Competitive base salary alongside attractive equity package.
- A monthly stipend to help you get to and from the office.
- Take as much time as you need to recharge your batteries.
- Lunch, dinner and plenty of snacks, provided daily.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Mid Level
Education Level
No Education Listed
