Back End Developer

About Us:We're building AI-powered talent products that help organizations hire, manageperformance, and grow their people. Our Nova platform enables human-like AI conversationsacross phone, chat, and video including AI-led candidate interviews and talent interactions atscale.The RoleWe are looking for a hands-on Lead Backend Engineer – Voice AI to build and own thebackend foundations of our Voice AI product.This is a high-ownership, 0 to 1 role. You will work closely with Product, Design, AI/ML, andEngineering teams to turn ambiguous problem statements into reliable, delightful, and scalablecustomer experiences. You will influence both product direction and technical architecture whilebuilding systems that power real-time, human-like AI conversations.What You’ll Do● Lead the design, development, and evolution of backend systems that power real-timeVoice AI experiences.● Build reliable, low-latency services for telephony, audio streaming, conversationorchestration, session management, and post-call workflows.● Develop and operate Voice AI integrations using platforms such as LiveKit, Vapi, Twilio,WebRTC, or similar technologies.● Integrate speech-to-text, text-to-speech, LLMs, retrieval systems, and AI evaluationpipelines into robust production workflows.● Build agentic and conversational workflows using tools such as LangChain,LangGraph, or equivalent frameworks.● Design scalable APIs, event-driven workflows, data models, background jobs, andfault-tolerant systems.● Own backend services built with Python, FastAPI, PostgreSQL, Redis, queues, andcloud infrastructure.● Lead, mentor, and grow a high-performing team of talented engineers; create clarity, seta high execution bar, and enable the team to deliver ambitious outcomes in afast-moving environment.● Partner with Product and Design to identify customer problems, define requirements, runexperiments, and ship end-to-end features.● Make thoughtful trade-offs across speed, product experience, latency, reliability, security,scalability, and cost.● Establish strong observability across the platform, including logging, monitoring, alerting,tracing, and meaningful product/quality metrics.● Define and improve metrics such as call success rate, latency, conversation completion,AI quality, and user satisfaction.● Raise the engineering bar through architecture reviews, code reviews, documentation,and mentorship.What We’re Looking For● 5–8 years of backend engineering experience, including ownership of customer-facingproduction systems.● Strong proficiency in Python and backend frameworks such as FastAPI.● Strong experience with relational databases, especially PostgreSQL, along with cachingand asynchronous processing using tools such as Redis, queues, and backgroundworkers.● Experience designing scalable APIs, distributed systems, asynchronous workflows, andevent-driven architectures.● Hands-on experience with Voice AI, conversational AI, telephony, WebRTC, real-timecommunications, or audio/video streaming systems.● Experience with platforms or tools such as LiveKit, Vapi, Twilio, or similar Voice AI andcommunications technologies.● Practical experience building LLM-powered applications, including prompt orchestration,tool calling, RAG, structured outputs, and AI evaluation/monitoring.● Experience with LangChain, LangGraph, or comparable agentic workflow frameworks.● Familiarity with cloud infrastructure, Docker, CI/CD, monitoring, logging, tracing, andproduction incident debugging.● Strong product mindset: you care deeply about user experience, customer outcomes,and business impact, not just clean code.● Ability to thrive in ambiguity, independently define a path forward, and take ideas fromzero to production.● Strong communication skills and the ability to work effectively across Engineering,Product, Design, and AI/ML teams.● Demonstrated experience leading or managing a strong engineering team, includingtechnical direction, prioritization, mentoring, performance coaching, and creating anenvironment of high ownership and accountability.Nice to Have● Experience building high-scale SaaS products.● Experience with multi-tenant systems, role-based access controls, and enterprise-gradesecurity.● Experience evaluating speech, LLM, and conversational quality through automated andhuman-in-the-loop feedback systems.● Exposure to recruiting, HR tech, talent management, or workflow automation products.● Experience leading technical initiatives or mentoring engineers in a fast-paced startupenvironment.Why Join Us● Build a foundational Voice AI product from the ground up.● Own meaningful technical and product decisions with high autonomy.● Work on AI experiences that directly shape how companies hire, engage, and growtalent.● Collaborate with a highly driven team operating at the intersection of AI and enterpriseSaaS.● Make a visible impact in an environment that values initiative, speed, learning, andownership.