About this role
Scaling real-time speech systems and maintaining strict uptime and latency SLAs requires a dedicated engineering approach to bridge the gap between advanced models and customer-facing voice agents. As a senior engineer on the Speech Team, the successful candidate will own the production systems that turn speech models and third-party capabilities into reliable, scalable experiences.
Working at the intersection of speech, machine learning infrastructure, and product engineering, this person will productionize models, enable self-hosted inference, and build robust operational foundations. Ideal candidates bring strong backend engineering fundamentals and thrive in collaborative environments where they can guide technical direction and mentor teammates.
What you will do
- Own the complete path from speech models to production by building the APIs, services, and integration layers required for the Speech Team.
- Productionize and operate self-hosted speech models while optimizing serving architecture, resource utilization, concurrency, and cost.
- Integrate and maintain third-party speech APIs behind durable abstractions with clear failover and vendor-performance monitoring.
- Build monitoring, alerting, dashboards, and incident-response practices to meet strict uptime, latency, and quality SLAs.
- Partner with speech and MLOps engineers to enable shadow traffic, staged rollouts, versioning, and rollback-safe releases.
- Collaborate across speech, platform, telephony, and product teams to set technical direction and mentor engineers.
What you need
- Demonstrate strong software engineering fundamentals and proficiency in Python, alongside experience designing maintainable APIs and services.
- Bring 5 or more years of experience building or operating production software, including ML-backed systems, streaming media, or latency-sensitive applications.
- Possess hands-on experience deploying, scaling, and troubleshooting machine learning models in production environments.
- Show familiarity with cloud infrastructure, distributed systems, containers, orchestration, service networking, CI/CD, and GCP.
- Apply a strong understanding of observability, alerting, incident response, capacity planning, and availability SLAs.
- Exhibit a demonstrated ability to work closely with cross-functional teams, mentor teammates, and make pragmatic trade-offs.
Benefits
- Competitive salary
- Comprehensive benefits
- Real opportunities for growth
- Robust training program
- Inclusive office environment
Skills and tech stack
Questions candidates ask
Where is the role located?
This position offers the opportunity to be based in our Canada Hub locations, specifically with a target base salary range for exceptional talent based in British Columbia, Canada.
What is the compensation for this role?
For exceptional talent based in British Columbia, Canada, the target base salary range is $173,400 to $219,300 CAD. Individual pay is determined by work location and additional factors, including job-related skills, experience, and relevant education or training.
Who does this position report to?
This role reports to our Senior Manager, AI Speech. The person will serve as an embedded senior back-end engineer on the Speech Team.