Backend Engineer (Voice AI)

TL;DR

Backend Engineer (Voice AI): Building and optimizing high-performance voice AI pipelines with an accent on pipeline stability, pluggability, and low-latency streaming. Focus on consolidating BullMQ to Kafka, hardening provider abstractions, and improving system reliability for real-time voice agents.

Location: Hybrid (San Francisco)

Salary: $180K – $265K + Equity

Company

hirify.global is a Voice AI platform for deploying intelligent voice agents that can listen, adapt, and resolve customer issues in real-time.

What you will do

• Own the stability and pluggability of the StreamModule pipeline (VAD → STT → LLM → TTS → Transport).
• Consolidate BullMQ into Kafka to optimize the messaging infrastructure.
• Harden provider abstractions for LLM, STT, and TTS to allow seamless addition of new models without core changes.
• Implement event-driven OpenTelemetry tracing for critical pipeline stages to improve observability.
• Resolve Postgres single points of failure (SPOFs) to enhance system reliability.
• Collaborate with agent and FDE teams on design reviews for new providers and pipeline changes.

Requirements

• Experience building real-time or streaming systems in production (e.g., media pipelines, event-driven backends).
• Deep understanding of queue architectures such as Kafka, BullMQ, or Temporal.
• Experience designing plugin or adapter architectures with decoupled implementations.
• Proven experience operating Postgres at scale, including connection pooling and schema migrations.
• Proficiency in instrumenting systems using OpenTelemetry and event-driven traces.

Nice to have

• Experience with TypeScript, Node.js, and NestJS.

Culture & Benefits

• Ownership-driven culture with a team comprised of 70% previous founders.
• Competitive salary and significant equity ownership.
• Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision insurance plans.
• Flexible time off policy and quarterly team off-sites.
• Additional perks including catered meals, gym membership, and a $10k annual L&D budget.