Senior Backend Engineer

David AI; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 140,000 - 220,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary

Flexible PTO policy

Top-notch health, dental, and vision coverage

Paid lunch and dinner in the office

401k access

Job summary

A leading audio data research company in San Francisco is looking for a Senior Backend Engineer to design and maintain scalable backend services. You will work with APIs and distributed systems, ensuring high performance under heavy data loads. Ideal candidates should have over 3 years of experience in backend development and relevant technologies. Competitive salary and flexible benefits are offered.

Qualifications

• 3+ years of experience in backend development with scalable APIs.
• Proficient with RESTful APIs and database design.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems and service-oriented architecture.

Responsibilities

• Design and maintain backend services for data collection.
• Define internal APIs to support ML and product features.
• Collaborate with teams to rapidly iterate and ship new ideas.

Skills

Backend development

RESTful APIs

Database design

Distributed systems

Cloud infrastructure

Performance optimization

Tools

PostgreSQL

Node.js

AWS

Job description

David AI provided pay range

This range is provided by David AI. Your actual pay will be based on your skills and experience — talk with your recruiter to learn more.

Base pay range

$140,000.00/yr - $220,000.00/yr

About Our Engineering Team: At David AI, our engineers build the pipelines, platforms, and models that transform raw audio into high‑signal data for leading AI labs and enterprises. We’re a tight‑knit team of product engineers, infrastructure specialists, and machine learning experts focused on building the world’s first audio data research company. We move fast, own our work end‑to‑end, and ship to production daily. Our team designs real‑time pipelines handling terabytes of speech data and deploys cutting‑edge generative audio models.

About This Role

As a Senior Backend Engineer at David AI, you’ll work across product surfaces to design clean APIs, build scalable services, and keep our systems performant under the weight of terabytes of audio data.

In this role, you will

• Design, build, and maintain production‑grade backend services that power everything from data collection to customer‑facing insights. Own the architecture and performance of distributed systems that ingest, transform, and serve audio data at scale.
• Define and evolve internal APIs and service boundaries to support a growing set of ML and product features.
• Build resilient, observable, and easy‑to‑debug systems with strong performance characteristics. Collaborate with product, operations, and ML teams to rapidly iterate on new ideas and ship fast.

Your background looks like

• 3+ years backend development building scalable APIs and services.
• Proficient with RESTful APIs, service interfaces, and database design (PostgreSQL, MySQL).
• Strong understanding of distributed systems and service‑oriented architecture.
• Extensive cloud infrastructure and infrastructure‑as‑code experience.
• Proficient in profiling, debugging, and optimizing backend systems.
• Experience launching systems from ground up in high‑growth environments (preferred).

Bonus points if you have

• Familiarity with event‑driven architectures, async processing, or large‑scale data pipelines.
• Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines and DevOps best practices.
• Built scalable data pipelines that have facilitated large‑scale event‑driven workflows across large volumes of audio or video data.
• Deployed ML models for inference in a production environment.

Some technologies we work with

• Next.js, TypeScript, TailwindCSS, Node.js, tRPC, PostgreSQL, AWS, Trigger.dev, WebRTC, FFmpeg.

Compensation And Benefits

• Rapid career growth at one of the fastest growing Series A companies, within a new and booming industry.
• Competitive salary and equity package.
• Flexible PTO policy.
• Top‑notch health, dental, and vision coverage with 100% company reimbursement for most plans.
• Paid lunch and dinner in the office, every day through DoorDash.
• 401k access.

Seniority level: Not Applicable

Employment type: Full‑time

Job function: Engineering and Information Technology

Industries: Software Development

Location: San Francisco, CA

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