Staff Engineer

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

Job summary

Aqua Voice is looking for a person to own technical systems across the stack in San Francisco. You will develop solutions for real-time transcription and work with languages such as TypeScript and Python. You should have experience building applications that operate at scale and be comfortable being the senior technical person. You'll join a small, growing team tasked with solving real user problems.

Qualifications

• Experience with GPU-based ASR models.
• Track record of maintaining sub-100ms latency.
• Comfortable with modern infrastructure tools.

Responsibilities

• Own technical systems across the stack.
• Implement real-time transcription solutions.
• Work on backend using Django and PostgreSQL.

Skills

GPU inference

Real-time transcription

System-level programming

Experience building and operating systems at scale

Strong architectural opinions

Ability to ship working systems from vague problems

Tools

TypeScript

Python

Swift

C#

Django

FastAPI

PostgreSQL

Terraform

AWS (RDS)

Redis

Job description

The Role

You will own technical systems across the stack. We're a small team, post-product-market-fit, and growing. We have real users and real problems.

We prefer modern tools—Bun over Node, Fly over AWS when it makes sense, PyTorch over legacy ML frameworks.

The Work

GPU inference: We run our own ASR models.

Real-time transcription: WebSocket state machines, multi-provider failover, sub-100ms latency targets. We track 30+ metrics per session.

Native apps: Swift on macOS, C# on Windows, Electron IPC. System-level programming.

Backend: Django for billing and analytics (oops). Celery for background jobs. PostgreSQL.

There are no separate infrastructure and product teams. You will work on all of it.

Stack

• Languages: TypeScript, Python, Swift, C#
• Runtime: Bun, Node.js, Django, FastAPI
• ML: PyTorch
• Infra: Fly.io, Terraform, AWS (RDS), Redis
• Protocols: gRPC, WebSocket, REST

What We're Looking For

• Experience building and operating systems at scale
• Strong opinions about architecture, loosely held
• Comfortable being the most senior technical person in the room
• Able to take vague problems and ship working systems
• Code that survives production