Staff Software Engineer

Socket.dev; Los Angeles (CA); On-site; USD 170,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Flip is hiring a Staff Software Engineer to join our production‑level engineering team in Marina del Rey, CA or Williamsburg, NY (onsite M–F). You’ll build scalable systems that power millions of live conversations and expand into new modalities like chat.

We value practical experience, low ego, and the ability to ship fast without compromising safety. You’ll work directly with the CTO and senior engineers to raise our velocity while keeping quality high.

Job description

TITLE: Staff Software Engineer

REPORTING TO: CTO

LOCATION: Marina del Rey, CA - OR - Williamsburg, NY (onsite M - F)

Who Is Flip?

Flip builds AI voice agents that handle millions of real customer conversations for some of the biggest brands, healthcare providers, and transportation companies in the world. When you call a company and the AI actually solves your problem - tracks the order, processes the return, refills the prescription - that's us.

We're a low-ego team. We don't need the limelight or the stardom - we care about solving really hard problems, fast. And here's the part worth stopping on:
outside the frontier labs, almost nobody is running AI in production at this scale. We are - millions and millions of live phone calls, handled by an engineering team a fraction of the size you'd expect. Very few teams our size serve this volume, and the reason is simple: we hold a very high bar for development.

HOW WE THINK

From day one, we've operated on first principles, and the first principle is the customer. If you have strong conviction that something delivers real business value for your customer, it shouldn't die in red tape or committee. You ship it - fast and often - because the customer is what actually matters. That's why there's a direct line from your keyboard to production here. We didn't remove the committee to move fast for its own sake; we removed it because conviction plus customer obsession doesn't need a permission slip.

Agentic development has changed the way we work - we're not shy about that. What it hasn't changed is the necessity of experience, especially at the production level. You can ship faster than ever now; that doesn't negate experience. Speed without judgment is how you break things millions of people depend on. That's why this posting asks for senior and staff engineers: we're hiring builders whose experience makes the new speed safe.

Our view is simple: let builders build. We care a lot less about stack experience or corporate pedigree than most companies - and a lot more about whether you've looked past the noise and want to build product you're genuinely proud of. Tools change monthly now. The instinct to build doesn't.

We keep the team lean on purpose - a high bar, real support, real resources - because that's where builders truly express themselves. The most common thing we hear from engineers after joining Flip is some version of "I could never have done this at my last company".

Deep industry expertise matched with ruthless execution creates wonderful work.
That's the whole formula.

WHAT YOU'LL BUILD

We're serving an orchestrated system of agents answering millions of contacts daily and now also expanding into other modalities like chat. Pulling that off requires elite engineering paired with incredible DevOps - voice is unforgiving:
it's real-time, there are no retries or page refreshes, and the customer is literally on the line.