Real-Time Translation Backend Engineer

LILT; Washington (District of Columbia); On-site; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

LILT is hiring a Backend Engineer in Washington, DC to build the real-time translation backend powering Converse. You will own APIs and services for audio ingestion, diarization, and translation routing, collaborating with frontend teams and interpreters.

Bring 2–5 years of backend experience with REST/GraphQL, streaming patterns, and CI/CD; US citizenship in the United States is required for this role. This is a hands-on position on the Create team.

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 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

Backend engineering

REST APIs

Streaming services

Node.js/TypeScript

GraphQL APIs

Database modeling

Testing & CI/CD

US citizenship

Tools

WebSockets

gRPC

Message queues

Job description

LILT is hiring a Backend Engineer in Washington, DC to build the real-time translation backend powering Converse. You will own APIs and services for audio ingestion, diarization, and translation routing, collaborating with frontend teams and interpreters.

Bring 2–5 years of backend experience with REST/GraphQL, streaming patterns, and CI/CD; US citizenship in the United States is required for this role. This is a hands-on position on the Create team.