Senior Backend Engineer (Python)

Ellipsis Health, Inc.; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 175,000 - 250,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

401k matching

Health, vision, and dental insurance

Flexible paid time off

Job summary

Ellipsis Health, Inc. is seeking a full-time engineer to enhance our voice pipeline by implementing and maintaining Python micro-services that orchestrate conversational AIs. You will work on integrating new providers, building APIs for latency optimization, and ensuring system security.

The ideal candidate has over 4 years of experience in building production back-ends, proficient in real-time streaming systems and modern Python frameworks. This hybrid position offers competitive compensation and flexible benefits.

Qualifications

• 4+ years building production back-ends in modern Python.
• Proven experience with real-time streaming systems, proficiency with asyncio and FastAPI.
• Deep understanding of concurrency and audio codecs.

Responsibilities

• Expand and maintain real-time voice pipelines with Python micro-services.
• Integrate new providers and transports for seamless communication.
• Build APIs for ultra-low latency streaming.

Skills

Production back-ends in modern Python

Real-time streaming systems

Concurrency and buffering

AWS/GCP/Azure

Relational and in-memory data stores

Communication skills

Education

B.S./M.S. in CS, EE, or related fields

Tools

Python

WebRTC

gRPC

FastAPI

PostgreSQL

Redis

Job description

Employment Type

Full time

Location Type

Hybrid

Compensation

• $175K – $250K

Responsibilities

• Expand and maintain our real‑time voice pipeline: design, implement, and maintain Python micro‑services for conversational AI orchestration—audio capture, streaming transcription, prompt/LLM logic, synthesis, and playback.
• Integrate new providers and transports: add plug‑ins for emerging ASR, TTS, LLM, and memory services; wire up WebRTC, SIP, or phone endpoints; build adapters that allow hot‑swapping components without downtime.
• Build APIs to deliver ultra‑low latency (<500 ms round‑trip): profile async pipelines (asyncio, FastAPI, gRPC), optimize buffering, concurrency, and back‑pressure handling.
• Instrument and observe every hop: emit structured traces (OpenTelemetry), metrics, and logs for each pipeline stage; define SLOs for first‑token latency, end‑to‑end latency, and streaming reliability.
• Ensure system resilience and HIPAA‑compliant security: implement circuit breakers, encryption in transit, per‑tenant isolation, and secrets rotation.
• Collaborate cross‑functionally with ML, product, data engineering, and client‑SDK teams to deliver features such as voice cloning, multimodal hand‑offs, and domain‑specific memory retrieval.

Qualifications

• 4+ years building production back‑ends in modern Python.
• Proven experience with real‑time streaming systems—WebRTC, WebSockets, or gRPC streaming—and proficiency with asyncio, FastAPI, or similar async frameworks.
• Deep understanding of concurrency, buffering, audio codecs (Opus, PCM), and distributed tracing.
• Solid understanding of AWS/GCP/Azure, including container orchestration (Kubernetes/EKS/GKE), message queues (Kafka/SQS/Pub/Sub), and IaC (Terraform).
• Solid grasp of relational (PostgreSQL) and in‑memory (Redis) data stores; able to model and persist conversational state.
• Excellent communication skills and a bias for measured, observable, and continuously deployable software.

Bonus Points

• B.S./M.S. in CS, EE, or related fields.
• Familiarity with voice‑agent frameworks, hands‑on with telephony (Twilio, Telnyx), SIP, or PSTN integrations.
• Experience integrating multimodal inputs (vision, text chat) into voice agents.
• Familiarity with GPU inference and streaming pipelines.

Salary and Benefits

We offer competitive salary and benefits, including 401k matching up to a certain percentage of your salary, health, vision, and dental insurance, and very flexible paid time off. The typical salary range for this role is $175,000 to $250,000 USD. The amount offered will be determined by a variety of factors including but not necessarily limited to your individual skills, qualifications, and past experience relative to the requirements of the role.

As a health technology company, we reserve the right to run a background check on any applicant to which we extend an offer and to re‑perform any such check at any time during the course of employment. Please know that there is no set policy on rejecting candidates because of certain background check results, and that we look at a candidate as a whole before making any decisions. We comply with all “ban the box” laws in applicable jurisdictions.