Staff/Principal Software Engineer

Recruiting From Scratch • San Francisco, CA

6d • Hybrid

About The Position

The company is building one of the world's leading real-time AI infrastructure platforms powering next-generation voice experiences across consumer and enterprise applications. Backed by more than $125M from Lightspeed, Kleiner Perkins, Founders Fund, Microsoft M12, Meta, Stanford, and other leading investors, the company has become one of the fastest-growing AI infrastructure startups with a highly technical engineering culture focused on shipping production AI systems at scale. As a Staff/Principal Software Engineer, you'll own some of the company's most critical backend infrastructure, including intelligent routing systems, real-time APIs, distributed AI services, and large-scale platform infrastructure powering hundreds of millions of production requests. You'll collaborate closely with ML researchers, product engineers, and platform teams to design highly scalable systems enabling the future of real-time AI. This is an exceptional opportunity to join an AI-native infrastructure company where Staff and Principal Engineers operate with significant technical autonomy while building foundational systems powering the next generation of AI products.

Requirements

• 8+ years of backend software engineering experience
• Experience building cloud-native distributed systems at production scale
• Experience operating backend services handling hundreds of queries per second or higher
• Experience building zero-to-one platform products in startup or high-growth environments
• Experience working at AI-native companies or modern infrastructure organizations
• Strong startup ownership mentality with demonstrated engineering execution
• Experience designing highly available backend systems
• Experience collaborating closely with ML researchers and platform teams
• Experience owning large production services end-to-end
• Previous startup experience strongly preferred over exclusively large enterprise backgrounds
• Strong backend software engineering fundamentals
• Expert-level systems design and distributed architecture expertise
• Experience with Go, Python, C++, Rust, or comparable statically typed backend languages
• Strong cloud infrastructure experience across AWS, GCP, or Azure
• Experience with Redis, Memcached, or distributed caching systems
• Experience with messaging systems, Pub/Sub, queues, or streaming infrastructure
• Strong PostgreSQL or MySQL experience operating production databases
• Experience building API gateways, routing layers, proxy systems, or service orchestration
• Experience building highly scalable backend services supporting AI or consumer products
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, Physics, or another technical discipline preferred
• Strong engineering background with demonstrated backend systems expertise
• Top technical universities or exceptional engineering accomplishments strongly preferred
• Outstanding technical problem-solving
• Strong engineering ownership
• Excellent collaboration skills
• High execution mentality
• Comfortable operating with ambiguity
• Strong communication skills
• Startup mindset with high execution velocity
• Structured systems thinker
• Passion for AI infrastructure and backend platform engineering
• Continuous learner embracing modern AI development workflows

Nice To Haves

• Experience with Apache Flink, Apache Beam, or large-scale data pipelines preferred

Responsibilities

• Design and build highly scalable backend infrastructure powering real-time AI applications
• Own the architecture and development of intelligent routing systems across hundreds of LLM providers
• Build API infrastructure supporting speech-to-speech, TTS, STT, RAG, and realtime AI products
• Design distributed systems capable of handling hundreds of millions of production requests
• Architect low-latency backend services optimizing cost, throughput, and reliability
• Build cloud-native infrastructure supporting real-time AI workloads
• Develop routing, failover, experimentation, caching, and orchestration systems across AI providers
• Design scalable data pipelines supporting AI infrastructure and platform analytics
• Collaborate closely with ML researchers to productionize cutting-edge AI models
• Drive technical architecture decisions across backend infrastructure and platform engineering
• Establish engineering best practices while maintaining hands-on ownership of production systems
• Rapidly prototype and launch new AI platform capabilities in a fast-moving startup environment

Benefits

• Competitive Equity Package
• Opportunity to build infrastructure powering one of the world's leading real-time AI platforms
• Direct collaboration with ML researchers and engineering leadership
• Significant ownership across core backend platform architecture
• High-impact engineering culture with exceptional career growth
• Well-funded Series A company backed by top-tier investors
• Opportunity to shape the future of real-time AI infrastructure

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Principal