Real-Time Translation Backend Engineer

Lilt---Lega-Italiana-Per-La-Lotta-Contro-I-Tumori-1; Washington (District of Columbia); On-site; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

LILT, a leader in real-time translation tech, seeks a backend engineer to join the Create team and power the Converse expansion. You will build and operate real-time translation pipelines, define API contracts with frontend teams, and own backend features from design through production in a fast-growing AI platform.

We value 2–5 years of backend experience, Node.js/TypeScript, REST/GraphQL, testing, observability, and the ability to work across multiple languages.

Qualifications

• 2-5 years of professional backend software engineering experience, ideally including production systems that handle real-time or streaming data.
• Experience building REST API endpoints as well as streaming services with WebSockets, gRPC, message queues, or comparable low-latency/event-driven patterns
• 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
• 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
• Solid grasp of testing and delivery practices: CI/CD and automated integration/e2e tests
• Ability to take a well-scoped ticket or spec and ship it with minimal oversight, while communicating blockers and timeline risk early
• US citizenship and residence in the United States

Responsibilities

• 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

Skills

Real-time data experience

Backend software engineering

US citizenship

Self-starter / autonomous

Ability to ship with minimal oversight

Tools

Node.js/TypeScript

Java

Python

REST APIs

GraphQL

WebSockets

gRPC

OAuth / Authentication

Job description

LILT, a leader in real-time translation tech, seeks a backend engineer to join the Create team and power the Converse expansion. You will build and operate real-time translation pipelines, define API contracts with frontend teams, and own backend features from design through production in a fast-growing AI platform.

We value 2–5 years of backend experience, Node.js/TypeScript, REST/GraphQL, testing, observability, and the ability to work across multiple languages.