Software Engineer

Tonic; San Francisco, Northern (CA, KY); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Tonic is building the first music-first AI notetaker that records live lessons and returns a practice-ready summary, plan, and audio clips. You will own the entire system, from architecture to payments and the user-facing surfaces, working directly with the founders.

Expect to shape the audio path, decide on scope and design, and ship features musicians rely on daily. This is a deep, end-to-end role in a compact, ambitious team.

Qualifications

• 5+ years building and shipping production software.
• Owned systems through launch and scale with strong judgment.
• Generalist range with end-to-end ownership and delivery mindset.

Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end surfaces from architecture to shipped product.
• Design, scope, and sequence features; ship weekly with minimal drama.
• Build and maintain the audio path so lessons survive in production.

Skills

Production software

Full-stack

iOS

AI tooling

Ownership

Job description

Intelligence for music learning. Tonic Notes records the music lesson and turns it into a summary, a practice plan built around the student, and audio clips of every passage worked on. It's the only music-first AI notetaker: fluent in playing, not just speech. Because the most important moments cannot be captured in words.

The role

The product records an hour of live music and speech, understands it, and gives it back as something a student can practice from. Behind that sentence sits real engineering: capture that cannot lose a lesson, audio processing on our own infrastructure, AI features that remember a student across months, payments, and the app and web surfaces that carry all of it.

You'll own whole systems, not tickets: the architecture calls, the build-versus-buy decisions, what ships this week and what earns a week more. The codebase is young enough that your decisions become its character, and there are no layers between you and the founders or between you and the user.

Own systems end to end

• Take whole surfaces from architecture to shipped: the first minutes of a student's journey, payments on the web, the features a musician touches every day
• Make the calls on scope, sequencing, and design, then live with them in production

Build the audio path

• Work where the bar is absolute: an hour of a child's lesson, unrecoverable if lost. Capture that survives crashes, backgrounding, and real teaching rooms
• Keep audio on our infrastructure by design; privacy here is architecture, not policy
• Turn models into features people rely on: summaries, practice plans, chat that remembers the student
• Own the distance between demo and dependable; judge quality like a user, not a benchmark

Set the pace

• Establish the patterns others build on: review, tooling, a release cadence that holds a weekly ship without drama
• Make the team faster by being on it; help hire the people who keep it that way

The first six months

• Owning a core system in production, end to end
• Architecture decisions that have held up under real usage
• A weekly release cadence that's faster and steadier
• At least one shipped feature musicians rely on daily

Who thrives here

• 5+ years building and shipping production software; deep in iOS or full-stack web, capable across both
• Has owned systems through launch and scale, and taken the 2 a.m. consequences of their own decisions
• A generalist's range, an owner's follow-through, and a senior's judgment about what not to build
• Uses modern AI tools as a force multiplier across the whole workflow
• Bonus: audio experience, or a childhood of music lessons you finally get to avenge

The team

We're a lean team of experienced engineers, music experts, and lifelong learners, with a track record of building products loved by billions of people around the world. Proud alumni of Google, YouTube, Disney, Twitter, and of Princeton, Penn, Carnegie Mellon. We work together with an uncanny efficiency. We play together with a whole lot of joy.