Senior Backend Engineer

David AI; San Francisco (CA); On-site; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary and equity package

Flexible PTO policy

Top-notch health coverage

Paid lunch and dinner

Job summary

A leading audio data research company in San Francisco is seeking a Senior Backend Engineer to design and build scalable services. You will own the architecture of distributed systems and collaborate with product and ML teams. The ideal candidate has over 3 years in backend development, with proficiency in RESTful APIs and database design. Competitive salary and benefits offered.

Qualifications

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

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain production-grade backend services.
• Own the architecture of distributed systems.
• Collaborate with product and ML teams.

Skills

Backend development

RESTful APIs

Database design

Distributed systems

Cloud infrastructure

Debugging

Optimizing backend systems

Tools

PostgreSQL

MySQL

AWS

Node.js

TypeScript

Next.js

Job description

About David AI

David AI is the first audio data research company. We bring an R&D approach to data–developing datasets with the same rigor AI labs bring to models. Our mission is to bring AI into the real world, and we believe audio is the gateway. Speech is versatile, accessible, and human—it fits naturally into everyday life. As audio AI advances and new use cases emerge, high-quality training data is the bottleneck. This is where David AI comes in.

David AI was founded in 2024 by a team of former Scale AI engineers and operators. In less than a year, we’ve brought on most FAANG companies and AI labs as customers. We recently raised a $25M Series A from Jack Altman (Alt Capital), Amplify Partners, First Round Capital, and other Tier 1 investors.

Our team is sharp, humble, ambitious, and tight-knit. We’re looking for the best research, engineering, product, and operations minds to join us on our mission to push the frontier of audio AI.

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.