The role / why it matters
As Staff Backend Engineer, you will own the distributed systems and reliability behind ambient AI workflows on mobile and web. This is a priority hire for a team handling long recording sessions, compute-heavy inference and unreliable networks. You will set technical direction, remain hands-on and help other engineers build systems ready for production.
What you'll do
• Design, build and operate backend systems for long-form audio ingestion, media processing and real-time and asynchronous streams.
• Orchestrate multi-stage transcription, diarization, LLM, clinical extraction and summarization workflows, including scheduling, queues, retries, timeouts, dead-letter handling, idempotency, replay and graceful degradation.
• Partner with mobile, product, AI, security and clinical teams to support poor network conditions and seamless offline workflows.
• Define SLOs and build observability with structured logs, metrics, distributed traces, dashboards and alerts.
• Lead incident response and post-incident analysis, then eliminate recurring failures through architecture, automation and testing.
• Evolve APIs, service boundaries, data models, cloud infrastructure and deployment systems while balancing reliability, latency, quality and infrastructure cost.
• Mentor engineers and establish standards for distributed systems and operational readiness.
Requirements
What we're looking for
• 7-15 years of backend, platform or infrastructure engineering experience, typically 8+ years, with exceptional candidates considered from 7 years.
• A current Staff Engineer or Tech Lead title and demonstrated ownership of technical direction, hands-on delivery and cross-functional alignment.
• Experience designing, building and operating production distributed systems at scale.
• Strong Python skills or proficiency in a modern backend language, with experience designing backend APIs, service boundaries, data models or marketplace search and recommendation infrastructure.
• Experience at high-bar large technology companies or Series B+ startups; a mix of structured engineering environments and hands-on startup or founding experience is valued.
• A Computer Science or other technical degree from a top-30 school, or mid-tier schooling supported by top-tier professional experience.
• Comfort with ambiguity, fast iteration and taking work from idea to production without extensive guidance.
• Strong communication, technical leadership and interest in healthcare technology.
Bonus points
• Audio, speech, dictation or real-time media streaming experience.
• Healthcare technology, Epic systems or experience in regulated environments such as HIPAA and SOC 2.
• Experience with Temporal, Kafka, Google Cloud Pub/Sub, SQS, Kubernetes, infrastructure as code, OpenTelemetry, Grafana or Sentry.
• Experience orchestrating LLM or multimodel inference workflows.
Benefits
Compensation and benefits
• $250,000-$300,000 annual base salary.
• A hybrid work model and ownership of systems that directly affect clinician workflows.
Location / work model
Full-time and hybrid in Mountain View, California. Candidates must already be based in the San Francisco Bay Area and able to attend the Mountain View office at least 3 days each week. The team may expect 4-5 days for people living nearby; the final cadence should be confirmed during the hiring process. Los Angeles is not an option and relocation support is not available. Existing visa transfers may be considered; new visa sponsorship is not available.
