Software Engineer - Rime Ai

Unusual; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 120,000 - 160,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Meaningful equity upside

High ownership and low bureaucracy

Job summary

Rime, a foundation modeling company based in San Francisco, is seeking a generalist Software Engineer to work across their stack, including platform APIs and infrastructure. The ideal candidate has 5+ years of experience and is proficient in low-level languages such as C++, Rust, or Go.

This role offers the opportunity to influence engineering decisions in a small team dedicated to high ownership. Benefits include equity upside and the chance to work in a fast-paced startup environment.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of IC engineering experience with strong backend fundamentals.
• Experience with at least one low-level language: C++, Rust, or Go.
• Systems-level thinking understanding across network and storage layers.
• Experience with gRPC or other bidirectional binary streaming protocols.
• Strong async written communication for global collaboration.

Responsibilities

• Manage platform APIs for authentication and billing.
• Feature work across the stack supporting TTS rollout.
• Integrate new billing and metering providers.
• Maintain and evolve the current TTS API stack.
• Develop low-latency, horizontally scalable streaming infrastructure.

Skills

Backend fundamentals

C++, Rust, or Go

Systems-level thinking

Integration with 3rd-party APIs

gRPC or bidirectional streaming protocols

Tools

Cloud infrastructure

Job description

Rime is a foundation modeling company that builds voice AI for enterprises running customer experiences at scale. Our models are purpose-built for high-volume conversational deployments, engineered for the accuracy, performance, and deployment flexibility that production environments actually demand.

We started from a different premise than the rest of the field: build voice AI for human connection, not slop. Before we trained a single model, we built our own corpus: full-duplex, studio-quality conversational speech of normal people, recorded and annotated by linguists. It's why our models are unparalleled in naturalism, and it's why enterprises pick Rime when pilots need to make it to production.

Role Overview

We're hiring a generalist Software Engineer to work across Rime's stack — platform APIs, systems, infrastructure, and wherever the company needs to move next. Your exact focus will evolve by design: we're building toward a next-generation architecture (gRPC-first, heterogeneous model serving, bidirectional streaming), and we need engineers who can operate across layers rather than stay confined to one. If you have strong fundamentals, a bias for clean interfaces, and the instinct to understand systems end-to-end, this role is for you.

Key Responsibilities

• Platform APIs: authentication, billing, account management, and the surface that keeps the business running.
• Feature work across the stack — supporting the rollout of the next generation of our TTS and end-to-end speech models.
• Integration and migration work as Rime evolves: token-based authentication, new billing and metering providers.
• Maintenance and hardening of the current TTS API stack and assisting in its evolution.
• Realtime, low-latency, horizontally scalable streaming speech infrastructure.

Qualifications / Experience

• 5+ years of IC engineering experience with strong backend fundamentals.
• Experience with at least one low-level language: C++, Rust, or Go.
• Systems-level thinking: you understand what's happening at the network, storage, and runtime layers, not just the application layer.
• You build clean interfaces and design for loose coupling; you don't create systems only you can debug. Bias towards codification and reproducibility.
• Comfortable moving through an unfamiliar codebase and shipping without extensive hand-holding.
• Strong async written communication — we’re global and the written word is how work gets done.
• Experience integrating 3rd-party APIs, such as payments, monitoring, and CRMs.
• Experience with gRPC or other bidirectional binary streaming protocols.
• Experience with multilingual monorepos where you pick the best language out of merit more than personal experience.
• Experience with cloud infrastructure.
• Experience at a small startup where the scope of your role was broad and undefined.
• Comfort working within ML systems.

Benefits and Working Style

• Work across a real stack with real production stakes — not a feature team inside a large org.
• Direct influence on engineering decisions at a formative company stage.
• Small, high-ownership team with no layers between you and the work.
• Meaningful equity upside.
• High ownership, high standards, low bureaucracy.
• SF / Bay Area.

If that sounds like you too, you’ll be a great fit for Rime!