Backend Engineer

Lilt; United States; On-site; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, vision insurance

Paid parental leave

Lifestyle stipend via Fringe platform

Equity, 401(k) matching, flexible time

Job summary

Lilt is seeking a Backend Engineer on the Create team to build services powering the real-time translation pipeline and meeting-platform integration. You’ll take well-scoped features from design through production with support and code reviews from senior teammates.

You’ll define clean API contracts with frontend engineers, build event-driven routing, and contribute to the translator correction and broadcast system as the product scales toward GA.

Qualifications

• Experience with event-driven/pub-sub architectures.
• Ability to take a well-scoped ticket and ship with minimal oversight; communicate blockers early.
• Frontend exposure to reason about API contracts with real-time UI.
• Experience building REST/GraphQL APIs, including authentication patterns.
• Relational/NoSQL data modeling for session state and transcripts.
• Experience with streaming services: WebSockets, gRPC, queues.

Responsibilities

• Define clean API contracts between backend and frontend.
• Build backend services for real-time translation pipeline.
• Implement event-driven routing for low-confidence segments.
• Develop APIs/services for bot/participant and meeting UI integration.
• Contribute to interpreter correction and broadcast system.
• Write and maintain automated tests; contribute to CI/CD pipelines.
• Instrument services for observability (logging, metrics, tracing).
• Collaborate with frontend engineers on API contracts.
• Participate in on-call rotation and triage production issues.
• Generate post-meeting assets (transcripts, formats).

Skills

Event-driven architectures

Frontend/React exposure

REST/GraphQL APIs

Authentication patterns

Relational/NoSQL data modeling

Streaming/WebSockets/gRPC

Backend languages (Node.js/TypeScript,

Tools

Kafka

Pub/Sub

OAuth

GraphQL

Job description

• As a Backend Engineer on the Create team, you’ll work closely with senior engineers and Product to build the services powering this Converse expansion — the real-time translation pipeline and the meeting-platform integration — taking well-scoped services and features from design through production with support and code review from more senior teammates
• You’ll help define clean API contracts with the frontend/interpreter-workbench engineers, contribute to the event-driven correction and broadcast system, and grow into owning larger pieces of the backend architecture as the product and team scale
• 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

Benefits

• Medical Benefits: Employees receive coverage of medical, dental, and vision insurance, plus FSA/DFSA, HSA, and Commuter benefits. In addition, LILT pays for basic life insurance, short-term disability, and long-term disability
• Paid parental leave is provided after 6 months
• Monthly lifestyle benefit stipend via the Fringe platform to allow employees to customize benefits to their lifestyle
• Compensation: Meaningful equity, 401(k) matching, and flexible time off plus company holidays

Requirements

• Experience with event-driven/pub-sub architectures (Kafka, Pub/Sub, or similar)
• Ability to take a well-scoped ticket or spec and ship it with minimal oversight, while communicating blockers and timeline risk early
• Enough frontend/React exposure to reason about API contracts with a real-time, stateful UI
• 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
• Experience integrating with third‑party platform APIs, SDKs, or webhooks (Slack, Zoom, or similar collaboration platforms)
• 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
• Solid grasp of testing and delivery practices: CI/CD and automated integration/e2e tests 2–5 years of professional backend software engineering experience, ideally including production systems that handle real-time or streaming data
• Familiarity with localization/TMS workflows: XLIFF, Translation Memory, MT vs. human translation pipelines
• Experience building REST API endpoints as well as streaming services with WebSockets, gRPC, message queues, or comparable low-latency/event-driven patterns
• Experience with speech/audio pipelines: diarization, streaming ASR, or audio stream handling
• US citizenship and residence in the United States
• Strong PlusHands‑on Microsoft Teams app or bot development specifically (Teams Toolkit, Bot Framework, Azure Communication Services, Microsoft Graph)
• Interest or coursework in NLP/ML systems
• Experience working on 0‑to‑1 products within a larger, established company
• Experience with observability tooling (e.g., Datadog) in production, latency-sensitive systems