Role OverviewWe're hiring a generalist Software Engineer to work across Rime's stack - platform APIs, systems, infrastructure, and wherever the company needs to move next. Your exact focus will evolve by design: we're building toward a next-generation architecture (gRPC-first, heterogeneous model serving, bidirectional streaming), and we need engineers who can operate across layers rather than stay confined to one. If you have strong fundamentals, a bias for clean interfaces, and the instinct to understand systems end-to-end, this role is for you.
What You'll OwnYou'll be involved in a collection of the following:
- Platform APIs: authentication, billing, account management, and the surface that keeps the business running.
- Feature work across the stack - supporting the rollout of the next generation of our tts and end-to-end speech models.
- Integration and migration work as Rime evolves: token-based authentication, new billing and metering providers.
- Maintenance and hardening of the current TTS API stack and assisting in its evolution.
- Realtime, low-latency, horizontally scalable streaming speech infrastructure.
What we're looking for- 5+ years of IC engineering experience with strong backend fundamentals.
- Experience with at least one low level language: C++, Rust, Go.
- Systems-level thinking: you understand what's happening at the network, storage, and runtime layers, not just the application layer.
- You build clean interfaces and design for loose coupling; you don't create systems only you can debug. Bias towards codification and reproducibility.
- Comfortable moving through an unfamiliar codebase and shipping without extensive hand-holding.
- Strong async written communication - we're global and the written word is how work gets done.
Bonus points- Experience integrating 3rd party API's, such as payments, monitoring, and CRMs.
- Experience with gRPC or other bidirectional binary streaming protocols.
- Experience with multilingual monorepos where you pick the best language out of merit more than personal experience.
- Experience with cloud infrastructure.
- Experience at a small startup where the scope of your role was broad and undefined.
- Comfort working within ML systems
Why Join Rime- Work across a real stack with real production stakes - not a feature team inside a large org.
- Direct influence on engineering decisions at a formative company stage.
- Small, high-ownership team with no layers between you and the work.
- Meaningful equity upside.
- High ownership, high standards, low bureaucracy.
- SF / Bay Area.
At Rime, we...- Are outliers
- Cut through the hype to focus on the craft
- Move fast with agency and freedom
- Maintain a growth mindset, finding joy in the struggle
- Do the right things, knowing that it'll lead to making money
If that sounds like you too, you'll be a great fit for Rime!
