Staff Platform Engineer, Infrastructure

Wispr Flow; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Health insurance

401(k) match

Parental leave

Relocation assistance

Equipment provided

Job summary

Wispr Flow is building Flow, a voice‑driven product with a world‑class platform. You will help design and scale the underlying services that turn speech into action, improving performance and reliability for millions of users and thousands of enterprise customers.

The role focuses on end‑to‑end platform ownership, providing fast feedback loops for product engineers, and shaping the technical direction as the team expands from a small core to a larger, capable group.

Qualifications

• Experience building scalable backend platforms for latency‑sensitive systems.
• Strong design skills for distributed services and APIs.
• Track record of improving performance and reliability at scale.

Responsibilities

• Build the seam between product and ML: credentials, proxy, routing, experimentation.
• See the next scaling bottleneck two quarters early and fix it before anyone notices it existed.
• Architect and own whole parts of the platform end to end.
• Make every product engineer faster — dev experience, deploy speed, abstractions.
• Help set technical direction as the team goes from three to eight.

Skills

Distributed systems

Backend engineering

Performance optimization

Python/FastAPI

System design

Tools

PostgreSQL

Redis

ClickHouse

Temporal/SQS

Terraform

AWS

gRPC

ALB

Fargate

Job description

About Wispr

We're building the first voice interface a billion people use every day.

Our first product, Flow, lets you talk instead of type anywhere on your computer or phone, and turns messy speech into polished text that is ready to send. It's scaled from $2M $50M in ARR in under 12 months with millions of users and thousands of enterprise customers. How we think

The team is still small enough that every person shapes what gets built.

About the Role

Every time someone talks to Flow, they're waiting — mid-sentence, cursor blinking — for their words to appear. 500ms feels like magic. 1000ms feels annoying. People use Flow hundreds of times a day, and they feel every single request.

Why this is hard: we've scaled our user base faster than our infrastructure could keep up with. We build and deploy our own voice models, and we've tuned our networking stack to hit P50 latencies of 500ms around the globe. But latency is just the beginning. Our platform layer sits behind every personalization feature, the multi-step workflows that turn speech into action, and the primitive infrastructure the rest of the product is built on. We're shipping new surfaces fast, which means the core platform now needs far more rigor and a lot more headroom.

We've built for millions of users and thousands of enterprises with a three-person platform team. You'd be on the ground floor, creating the systems that support the next hundred million.

What You'll Do

• Build the seam between product and ML: credentials, proxy, routing, experimentation.




• See the next scaling bottleneck two quarters early and fix it before anyone notices it existed.




• Architect and own whole parts of the platform end to end.




• Make every product engineer faster — dev experience, deploy speed, abstractions.




• Help set technical direction as the team goes from three to eight.

This role is perfect for you if:

• You've rewritten an entire service because you realized the bugs were all coming from bad architecture.




• You've seen systems break, understood why, and now think twelve months ahead.




• You build the foundation patiently so that everything after it ships faster.




• You get excited about complex problems with lots of constraints and edge cases.




• You care as much about the user journey as the technical requirements.

Tech stack: Python/FastAPI, PostgreSQL, Redis, ClickHouse, Temporal/SQS, Terraform, AWS, gRPC, ALB, Fargate

Logistics

Location. About 60% of the team is in San Francisco and the rest are remote, mostly US-based.

• If you're in SF: you'll be in the office most days. We think the best work happens in person. Most of the team is here five days a week, and a few do three or four days depending on family or long commutes.




• If you're remote: we're open to remote for some roles. We fly remote teammates to SF for three to four days a month.

Visa sponsorship. We sponsor visas: H1B, O1, EB1, L1, STEM + OPT, and more. We can't successfully sponsor for every role and every candidate, but if we make you an offer we'll make every reasonable effort, and we retain an immigration law firm to help.

What we offer

We're a small, focused team that cares deeply about the quality of our work and the people we do it with. Here's what you can expect:

• Equity on employee-friendly terms, including early exercise and extended exercise windows with a combination of ISOs and RSUs. Ask us for more details!




• Health, dental and vision. We cover 100% of the premium on the Anthem Blue Cross Gold PPO, and 75% of premiums for dependents. (US)




• 401(k) with up to a 4% match. (US)




• 16 weeks of paid parental leave (12 weeks for non-birthing parent).




• Flexible time off and company holidays.




• All meals in the office, plus commuter benefits and relocation reimbursement if you're moving to San Francisco.




• A high-spec laptop, monitor, and a whisper-friendly microphone.




• Regular team events and off-sites.

We are committed to ensuring a fair and accessible interview process. If you need any accommodations or adjustments, please let us know.