Sr Backend Engineer

Slang AI; New York (NY); Hybrid; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Slang AI in New York is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to shape our core product areas, including telephony infrastructure and real-time voice AI. You'll devote most of your time to backend services and own features end-to-end, mentoring peers and guiding technical direction.

You'll collaborate with product managers and engineers, participate in design reviews, and contribute to cloud-native, scalable systems.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of backend development experience.
• Experience with REST/GraphQL APIs.
• Experience with Docker and cloud platforms.
• Strong testing practices and debugging skills.
• AI-native mindset and mentoring ability.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement scalable backend services for core product areas.
• Own features end to end and mentor engineers on the team.
• Develop GraphQL APIs and integrate telephony/voice AI components.
• Deploy containerized applications on Google Cloud Platform or similar.
• Collaborate with product managers and designers to shape roadmaps.

Skills

Backend development

OO design

REST/GraphQL APIs

Docker

Cloud platforms

Testing practices

AI fluency

Mentoring

Tools

Twilio/Telnyx

Job description

About Slang AI

Slang AI is redefining customer engagement through conversational AI, making every interaction seamless and efficient. Our mission is to transform the restaurant industry by providing the ultimate voice AI solution for consistently outstanding customer experiences.

About Slang AI

Slang AI is redefining customer engagement through conversational AI, making every interaction seamless and efficient. Our mission is to transform the restaurant industry by providing the ultimate voice AI solution for consistently outstanding customer experiences.

At Slang AI, we believe how we build matters just as much as what we build. We foster a culture rooted in hospitality, ownership, and clarity, where every “Slangsta” feels valued, supported, and connected to the broader impact of our work in the AI-powered future of restaurants.

What Your Experience Will Be

You’ll join Slang's Engineering team as a Senior Software Engineer, contributing across our core product areas including telephony infrastructure, real-time voice AI, and application functionality. Your work will help restaurants automate customer interactions and improve service through natural conversation. You’ll spend roughly 90% of your time developing backend services. Our backend is written in Kotlin, but prior Kotlin experience is not required; strong fundamentals in any object-oriented language will set you up to ramp quickly. You’ll make occasional contributions to React/TypeScript frontend features as needed. Your work will directly impact thousands of restaurant interactions daily, helping businesses streamline operations and deliver better customer experiences.

You’ll report to the Direct or Engineering & Data, collaborating closely with product managers, conversation designers, and fellow engineers. As a senior engineer, you’ll own features end to end and help shape technical direction for your pod, not just execute against a spec. The role includes key ceremonies: daily standups at 1:00 PM ET, bi-weekly cycle planning, and weekly Show & Tell sessions. You’ll use modern collaboration tools like Slack, GitHub, and video conferencing to stay connected with the team. You’ll mentor junior and mid-level engineers through code reviews and pair programming, and set the quality bar others build on.

Why You Belong Here And How You Will Grow

Our engineering culture emphasizes pragmatic solutions, continuous learning, and collaborative problem-solving. We believe in domain-driven design, comprehensive testing, and building systems that gracefully handle the complexities of real-world restaurant operations. You’ll work alongside engineers who care about reliable, scalable conversational experiences and who regularly share knowledge through Show & Tell sessions and detailed technical documentation.

As a senior engineer, you’ll go deep on conversational AI, telephony at scale, and modern cloud-native architectures while taking ownership of architectural decisions and technical standards. You’ll pick up Kotlin and functional programming patterns on the job while working on production systems that handle real-time voice interactions. The cross‑functional nature of the role, and the scope you’ll own, sets you up to grow toward staff‑level and technical leadership work: driving design across services, influencing the roadmap, and raising the bar for the engineers around you.

What Success Looks Like

• Design and implement scalable backend services following domain-driven design principles, with comprehensive error handling and testing
• Drive technical design for features you own, and help shape architecture across the services your pod touches
• Develop and maintain GraphQL APIs that efficiently serve both internal and external clients
• Create robust integrations with our telephony (Twilio/Telnyx) and voice AI stack, handling edge cases and failure scenarios gracefully
• Design efficient Firestore data models that balance performance, cost, and maintainability
• Implement comprehensive observability including logging, metrics, tracing, and actionable alerting
• Deliver production-ready code with appropriate test coverage (unit, integration, and end-to-end)
• Lead code reviews, providing constructive feedback and raising the quality bar for the team
• Document technical decisions, API contracts, and system architecture clearly
• Deploy containerized applications to Google Cloud Platform following cloud-native best practices
• Occasionally build or update React/TypeScript frontend components for restaurant staff and customers
• Shape coding standards and best practices, and mentor junior and mid-level engineers as they grow

Required Qualifications

What You Will Bring

• 5+ years of professional software development experience, primarily in backend systems
• Strong proficiency in at least one object‑oriented language (e.g., Java, Kotlin, C#, Python, TypeScript, Ruby, C++, Go), with a solid grasp of OO design principles and willingness to work day-to-day in Kotlin
• A track record of owning features end to end and mentoring less-experienced engineers
• Experience building and consuming RESTful or GraphQL APIs
• Familiarity with NoSQL databases and data modeling concepts
• Experience with containerization (Docker) and cloud platforms (GCP, AWS, or Azure)
• Strong understanding of software testing practices and test-driven development
• Excellent debugging and troubleshooting skills
• AI fluency: you actively use AI tools in your daily engineering work, not just awareness of them. We’re AI native, and we expect the same of our engineers
• Basic familiarity with React and TypeScript (occasional frontend adjustments may be needed)
• Ability to work independently and manage your time effectively in a remote/hybrid environment
• Strong written and verbal communication for remote/hybrid collaboration
• Willing and able to take a week