This Senior Full Stack Engineer role is based in Washington D.C. (with preferred locations also in Boston, MA and Indianapolis, IN) and suits an experienced software professional with a background in real-time or streaming systems. The position involves driving the expansion of Lilt's Converse product line.
Role Overview
Lilt is seeking a Senior Full Stack Engineer to lead technical strategy and execution for the expansion of the Converse product, which delivers real-time, multi-party translation for live meetings and conversations. This ground-floor role sits on the Create team and requires owning the end-to-end architecture, technical roadmap, and hands-on implementation of both the backend translation service and customer-facing interfaces.
Key Responsibilities
Own the architecture and technical roadmap for the Converse product expansion, encompassing the central real-time translation service and user-facing surfaces.
Architect and build a low-latency, N-way translation pipeline including audio ingestion, diarization, streaming ASR, machine translation orchestration, and result fan-out.
Develop the live meeting experience such as bot participants, side panels, and on-stage captions by integrating with host meeting platform SDKs and APIs.
Build the real-time interpreter workbench featuring live segment queues, low-confidence flagging, translation memory matches, and broadcast corrections.
Design event-driven correction and broadcast systems to route flagged segments to on-call interpreters while isolating corrections by language.
Partner with Product and Design to translate requirements into technical plans and deliver new product surfaces.
Collaborate with device and mobile engineering teams to extend shared translation-service architectures across platforms.
Establish testing, CI/CD, and release practices using GitHub Actions and automated end-to-end tests.
Recruit, mentor, and define engineering standards for the growing team.
Requirements
Five or more years of professional full-stack software engineering experience with a track record of owning real-time or streaming systems end-to-end.
Backend expertise in REST API endpoints, real-time transport mechanisms like WebSockets or gRPC, event-driven architectures, and state management.
Frontend expertise in building complex, stateful, real-time user interfaces using React and TypeScript.
Experience integrating with third-party platform SDKs or extension frameworks such as bots, side panels, and webhooks.
Comfort working adjacent to ASR, machine translation, or other latency-sensitive machine learning systems.
Demonstrated ability to scope ambiguous, zero-to-one product requirements into technical plans and hit delivery dates.
Experience building validation logic for edge cases across diverse customer configurations.
US citizenship and residency in the United States.
Nice to Have
Experience with speech and audio pipelines, including diarization, streaming speech recognition, or audio multiplexing.
Prior background building CAT tools, translation memory systems, or linguist-facing review interfaces.
Familiarity with localization workflows, XLIFF, and machine translation versus human translation pipelines.
Experience with cross-platform, embedded, or mobile-adjacent architectures.
Experience shipping in regulated or high-security environments.
Hands-on Microsoft Teams app or bot development, including Teams Toolkit and Bot Framework.
Experience mentoring engineers and setting technical standards for new product lines.
Familiarity with post-meeting asset generation such as transcript exports and summarization.
Skills and Tools
React
TypeScript
WebSockets
gRPC
GitHub Actions
REST APIs
ASR and Machine Translation pipelines
Salary and Benefits
Salary range: $125,120 to $166,000 (Multiple Ranges)
About the Company
Lilt is an artificial intelligence company on a mission to make the world's information accessible across languages. Utilizing machine translation and human-in-the-loop expertise, the company serves global enterprises and organizations including Intel Corporation, Canva, the United States Department of Defense, the United States Air Force, and ASICS. Backed by Sequoia, Intel Capital, and Redpoint, Lilt is headquartered around a culture guided by core company virtues.
How to Apply
Candidates should apply on the official company careers page.
