Systems Engineer

Recall Labs; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 120,000 - 160,000; Full time

Job summary

Recall Labs is seeking an experienced software engineer to develop foundational infrastructure for their growing video processing product. You'll have ownership over features and work closely with the founding team in a dynamic and evolving environment.

The ideal candidate has a strong background in systems software development, with at least 4 years of experience, and is passionate about making a significant impact while engaging with customers. Join us in shaping the future of video processing!

Qualifications

• 4+ years of systems software development experience required.
• Strong ability to learn new technologies and work in unfamiliar domains.
• Experience in a high-trust and low-structure environment is beneficial.

Responsibilities

• Develop core product features, including APIs and video processing pipelines.
• Scale and maintain extensive video processing infrastructure.
• Engage directly with customers to better understand their needs.

Skills

Systems software development experience

Customer empathy

Adaptability to new technologies

Job description

Build Foundational Infrastructure for the World’s Largest Dataset

You'll be our eleventh engineering hire. You'll have full ownership over major features, play a huge role in creating the culture of our engineering team, and will work closely with the founders.

You will develop high performance real-time code, deploy to large scale infrastructure, and process massive volumes of data. To give you a sense of the problem space you’ll be working in:

• We process over 3TB per second of raw video at peak load
• We launched 18 million+ EC2 instances in the last month

Responsibilities

• Build the core product, from APIs, to real-time video processing pipelines. Be independent and own major features through development and deployment.
• Operate, scale and extend our extensive video processing infrastructure. You'll be responsible for running your code in production.
• Work directly with customers to solve their problems. All team members participate in customer support in order to drive empathy for our users and help us build better products.

Your Qualifications

• 4+ years of systems software development experience
• Deep customer empathy, including the desire to speak with customers and make product decisions
• Strong ability to learn new technologies and be productive in unfamiliar domains
• Bonus points: Previously founded a startup. Extra bonus for a dev-tools startup.

You might be the right fit if…

• You love writing code, but you love having impact more: We’re a team of engineers at heart, but our #1 goal is building the best possible product. That means making pragmatic choices and looking for 80/20 solutions.
• You’re great at “figuring it out”: Recall.ai is a low-structure, high-trust environment. There’s minimal process, and we’re growing so fast that circumstances are constantly changing. If you can take a high level goal and independently figure out how to achieve it, you’ll fit in great.
• You don’t give up: The most impactful problems we’ve solved initially seemed impossible. We work in a uniquely hard problem domain, and every important problem needs heaps of persistence.
• You want to be a founder: Joining early at a fast-growing, high-talent-density startup is the best thing you can do if you want to be a founder. Anything you want to learn about startups or the business, we’ll teach you.

You might be the wrong fit if…

• You’re looking for a chill gig: Startups are very hard, especially if they’re growing fast. You’ll have a ton of responsibility, and there’s always an enormous amount of stuff to do. Raw hours actually make a big difference in the impact we can make right now.
• You want to ship perfect code: Velocity is a startup’s only advantage. We don’t have the luxury to wait for perfection, and we’re always looking for ways to get more done with less. We release as soon as we can, and get customer feedback immediately.

Join Us!

Recall.ai is growing extremely fast.

• In 2023 we grew revenue over 12x and raised our Series A
• In 2024 we grew revenue over 3x and crossed 1000 companies building on the API
• In 2025 we power top companies like Calendly, Instacart, and more, and on track to grow revenue more than 3x again.

Hypergrowth of the business means massive growth opportunities for everyone on the team. And not just on the technical side — anything you want to learn about the business we’ll teach you.