Lilt

Backend Engineer

Lilt • $110K — $130K *
Information Technology
Less than 5 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 2-5 years of backend software engineering experience, especially with real-time or streaming data
  • Proficient in building REST APIs and streaming services using WebSockets, gRPC, or similar technologies
  • Strong skills in Node.js/TypeScript, Java, or Python, with flexibility to work across languages
  • Experience with REST/GraphQL APIs and authentication methods like OAuth
  • Familiarity with relational and NoSQL data modeling
  • Knowledge of CI/CD practices and automated testing
  • Ability to independently manage tasks while effectively communicating challenges

Responsibilities

  • Build and maintain backend services for real-time translation pipelines
  • Implement event-driven routing logic for low-confidence segments
  • Develop APIs and services for translation delivery in meeting platforms
  • Contribute to interpreter correction systems for real-time updates
  • Write and maintain automated tests and support CI/CD pipelines
  • Instrument services for observability to aid in debugging
  • Collaborate with frontend engineers to define API contracts
  • Participate in on-call rotation and assist with production issue triage
  • Generate post-meeting assets like transcripts and verification metadata

Benefits

  • Flexible work environment with preferred locations in major US cities
  • Opportunity to work on cutting-edge real-time translation technology
  • Collaborative team culture with opportunities for mentorship
  • Access to professional development resources
  • Participation in innovative projects that impact global communication
Full Job Description
Location & eligibility: This position requires US citizenship and residence in the United States. Preferred locations are Washington, D.C.; Boston, MA; and Indianapolis, IN.
What You'll Do
  • Build and maintain backend services for the real-time translation pipeline: audio ingestion, diarization hookups, streaming ASR/MT orchestration, and result fan-out to every configured meeting language
  • Implement the event-driven routing logic that flags low-confidence segments and routes them to the correct on-call interpreter by language
  • Build APIs and services backing the bot/agent participant and meeting side panel that deliver translation into the host meeting platform, with guidance from senior engineers
  • Contribute to the interpreter correction and broadcast system - ensuring corrections are isolated to the correct language and broadcast to all participants in real time
  • Write and maintain automated tests (unit, integration, e2e) and contribute to CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions) for new backend services
  • Instrument services for observability - logging, metrics, tracing - to support debugging of latency-sensitive, multi-party sessions
  • Partner with frontend/fullstack engineers on the Create team to define clean API contracts between backend services and the live meeting UI and interpreter workbench
  • Participate in on-call rotation and help triage production issues as the product moves toward GA
  • Help generate post-meeting assets: diarized transcripts, exportable formats (TXT/WebVTT/JSON), and per-line verification metadata
What We're Looking For
Required
  • 2-5 years of professional backend software engineering experience, ideally including production systems that handle real-time or streaming data
  • Experience building REST API endpoints as well as streaming services with WebSockets, gRPC, message queues, or comparable low-latency/event-driven patterns
  • Solid experience with Node.js/TypeScript, Java, Python, or a comparable backend language/ecosystem, and the ability to work across more than one when needed
  • Experience building and consuming REST/GraphQL APIs, including authentication patterns (OAuth, API keys/tokens, service accounts)
  • Comfort with relational/NoSQL data modeling for session state, transcripts, and configuration data
  • Solid grasp of testing and delivery practices: CI/CD and automated integration/e2e tests
  • Ability to take a well-scoped ticket or spec and ship it with minimal oversight, while communicating blockers and timeline risk early
  • US citizenship and residence in the United States
Strong Plus
  • Experience with speech/audio pipelines: diarization, streaming ASR, or audio stream handling
  • Experience integrating with third-party platform APIs, SDKs, or webhooks (Slack, Zoom, or similar collaboration platforms)
  • Familiarity with localization/TMS workflows: XLIFF, Translation Memory, MT vs. human translation pipelines
  • Experience with event-driven/pub-sub architectures (Kafka, Pub/Sub, or similar)
  • Enough frontend/React exposure to reason about API contracts with a real-time, stateful UI
Bonus
  • Hands-on Microsoft Teams app or bot development specifically (Teams Toolkit, Bot Framework, Azure Communication Services, Microsoft Graph)
  • Experience working on 0-to-1 products within a larger, established company
  • Interest or coursework in NLP/ML systems
  • Experience with observability tooling (e.g., Datadog) in production, latency-sensitive systems


About Lilt

Industry
Founded
2015

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