Founding Engineer – CTO Track (Voice AI)

Genaiva; United States; On-site; USD 120,000 - 160,000; Full time

Job summary

A cutting-edge company is seeking a Founding Engineer to work closely with the founder and take ownership of its technical foundation. This role is not just about engineering—it's about shaping the company's product, architecture, and culture from the ground up. Ideal candidates should have substantial experience in backend systems and demonstrated leadership capabilities in a fast-paced environment.

Benefits

Equity with a standard vesting schedule

Compensated 90-day contract to build mutual alignment

Qualifications

• 4+ years of hands-on experience in backend or full-stack software engineering.
• Strong proficiency in Node.js and Python.
• Experience in building real-time or distributed systems.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement scalable backend services.
• Drive technical execution and manage cloud infrastructure.
• Collaborate closely with the founder to define technical standards.

Skills

Node.js

Python

Cloud Infrastructure

Scalable Systems

Communication

Collaboration

Job description

Genaiva is redefining how businesses manage phone-based customer service by replacing phone lines with real-time, AI-powered voice agents.

We’re post-MVP with paying pilot clients, strong demand validated through potential partnerships, and early investor backing. As we begin scaling and accelerate building our in-house AI stack, we’re hiring a Founding Engineer to work side-by-side with the Founder and take full ownership of our technical foundation.

This is a high-impact role with a clear path to CTO-level leadership. You’ll influence everything from system architecture to team culture and product direction.

This is a hands-on, high-trust leadership role. You’ll partner directly with the founder to:

• Translate vision into systems: Turn the company’s goals into a concrete, scalable, secure product.
• Define scopes of work: Architect the platform and break it into buildable, ownable pieces.
• Drive technical execution: Build, ship, and maintain the core backend and infrastructure of the voice AI platform.
• Shape the team: Help define what roles to hire, how to structure the engineering org, and how to compete with the giants.
• Own scale and performance: Ensure the product can support 100s of businesses with low-latency voice interactions, GPU efficiency, and uptime.
• Be a builder and leader: You’ll write code, own decisions, speak with users, and help raise the technical bar every day.

What success looks like:

• You’ve taken ownership of our stack and pushed it to production-level performance and reliability.
• You’ve helped hire and onboard the next critical technical team members.
• You’ve contributed to key decisions — from build vs. buy, to AI architecture, to vendor and infra choices.
• You’ve built something that competitors notice, users love, and scales fast.
• You’ve become the technical co-pilot to the CEO.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement scalable backend services (Node.js, Python)
• Build, Integrate and optimize ASR, TTS, and LLM systems in production
• Manage cloud infrastructure (Azure/AWS/GCP), CI/CD, observability, and containerized deployments
• Optimize internal dashboards and admin tools
• Collaborate closely with the founder to define and enforce technical standards and roadmap prioritization
• Collaborate with the founder to stay ahead of emerging trends in voice AI and recommend innovations to keep GENAIVA competitive

Qualifications

• 4+ years of hands-on experiencein backend or full-stack software engineering, with a proven track record of building and maintaining production-grade systems in fast-paced environments.
• Strong proficiency in Node.js and Python, with demonstrated ability to architect and maintain scalable, testable, and maintainable codebases.
• Expertise in building real-time or distributed systems, especially those using event-driven or microservices architectures to handle high-throughput, low-latency applications.
• Deep familiarity with cloud infrastructure(Azure, AWS, or GCP), including deploying and maintaining containerized services using Docker, and implementing modern CI/CD pipelines.
• Strategic and systems-level thinking, capable of balancing rapid iteration with long-term scalability, security, and maintainability.
• Exceptional communication and collaboration skills, with a focus on transparency, ownership, and clear articulation of trade-offs and technical decisions.
• Initiative-driven, entrepreneurial mindset— thrives in ambiguous environments, quickly prototypes solutions, and continuously improves products based on real-world feedback.
• Experience working cross-functionallywith engineering teams and client-facing teams (e.g., sales, customer success) in a high paced, iterative development cycle.
• User-centric product instinct, with a passion for building intuitive, performant systems that solve real, high-friction user problems.
• Working knowledge of voice technologiessuch as telephony APIs (e.g. Telnyx/Twilio), real-time streaming protocols, or speech-driven user interfaces.
• Experience deploying machine learning models into production, particularly around inference pipelines and APIs.
• Solid understanding of backend performance optimization, including API security, caching strategies, memory management, and reliable data pipelines.
• Hands-on experience integrating speech or language AI models, such as automatic speech recognition (ASR), text-to-speech (TTS), or large language models (LLMs), into customer-facing workflows.
• Familiarity with point-of-sale (POS) systemsor restaurant tech ecosystems, especially integrations with platforms like Square, Clover, Toast, or custom APIs.
• Background in infrastructure scalability, including experience managing GPU workloads, cloud cost optimization, or deploying AI models in high-throughput environments.
• Prior experience as a founding engineer or early technical hire, ideally within a startup or high-growth environment, with a comfort level wearing multiple hats and owning full feature lifecycles.
• Passion for competing with larger incumbentsby building leaner, smarter, and more user-centric technical solutions.
• Familiarity with real-time conversational systems, including streaming audio pipelines, latency optimization, or user feedback loops for continuous model improvement.
• Contributions to open-source AI, speech, or infra projects, or experience working with cutting-edge tools in the LLM/voice tech ecosystem (e.g., Whisper, Deepgram, LLaMA, Hugging Face models).

How This Role Fits In

This is not just an engineering role — it's a company-building role. You’ll sit at the intersection of technology, product, and growth. As the first technical hire beyond contractors and the founder, your work will shape our product experience, system architecture, and team culture from the ground up. You’ll have direct input into strategic decisions, and meaningful equity in the company you’re helping to build.

Interview Process

We respect your time and aim to keep things clear and efficient. Here’s what you can expect:

• 20 min intro call with the founder — Talk experiences, expectations, alignment, and working styles.
• 60 min technical deep dive — conversation-style, focused on how you think, build, and reason.
• Offer extended (with references checked at the final stage)

Hiring Structure & Onboarding

The role will begin with a compensated 90-day contract. We believe great teams are built through mutual alignment, not just resumes. This model ensures clarity, builds trust, and gives both you and Genaiva the chance to grow together deliberately.

Compensation post 90-day contract

This is a founding team position, structured for long-term ownership and impact.

Salary: In line with an early pre seed start up.

Equity: Meaningful equity with a standard vesting schedule. You’ll join as an early builder of the company and have a clear path to being a co-owner.

Upside: As one of the first hires, your contributions will directly shape the product/architecture/team and your ownership will reflect that. This is an opportunity to help lay the foundation of Genaiva's platform and engineering culture.

We’re looking for someone who’s here to build something enduring, not just collect a paycheck.

How to Apply

After submitting your response to this LinkedIn posting please email [e-mail] an updated resume as well as your answers to the following questions:

• Tell us about a time you built something from scratch in a high-ambiguity environment. What drove your decisions, and how did you handle trade-offs or uncertainty?
• What’s something you’ve taught yourself that most people would’ve waited to be trained for?
• What’s something you’ve gone deep into lately, maybe in your downtime, that ended up shaping how you think or work?

Note: Please include any materials you’d like us to review as part of your application, such as your GitHub profile or technical portfolio.(Links are preferred. If sharing private repositories or projects, please include access instructions.)

Even if you don’t check every box, if you believe you’re the right fit to help us build and scale Genaiva, we’d love to hear from you. We move quickly and try to give clear feedback every step of the way.

Seniority level

• Seniority level

  Mid-Senior level

Employment type

• Employment type

  Other

• Industries

  Software Development

Referrals increase your chances of interviewing at Genaiva by 2x

Get notified about new Engineer jobs in United States.

Chief Information Officer – Synergie Medication Collective (Fully Remote)

New York, NY $270,000.00-$271,000.00 3 weeks ago

Chief Technology Officer – Professional Services

Chief Information Officer- Polar Operations

Chief Technology Officer - Professional Services

Chief Technology Officer, RAPID Manufacturing Institute

Chief Information Security Officer - Remote Opportunity

Chief Business Officer at World Education Services (WES)

White Plains, NY $175,000.00-$215,000.00 1 week ago

Chief Technology Officer / SVP, Engineering

Staff Vice President, Information Technology - Digital Experience Engineering

Staff Vice President, Information Technology - Digital Experience Engineering

Staff Vice President, Information Technology - Digital Experience Engineering

Staff Vice President, Information Technology - Digital Experience Engineering

Staff Vice President, Information Technology - Digital Experience Engineering

Performance and Technology - Senior Vice President

Staff Vice President, Information Technology - Digital Experience Engineering

Vice President, Strategic Integration & Program Leadership

Vice President of Solutions Architecture

Divisional Vice President - Microsoft Channel Sales

Associate Vice President (AVP), Salesforce Technical Delivery

Associate Vice President (AVP), Salesforce Technical Delivery

Senior Vice President Public Relations, B2B Technology

Vice President, Artificial Intelligence - Remote USA (*eligible states)

United States $290,000.00-$325,000.00 2 weeks ago

We’re unlocking community knowledge in a new way. Experts add insights directly into each article, started with the help of AI.