Staff Software Engineer, Platform

David AI; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 195,000 - 315,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Unlimited PTO

Health/Dental/Vision coverage

FSA/HSA access

401k plan

Meals via DoorDash

Barry’s classes

Job summary

David AI is seeking a Staff Software Engineer, Platform to design clean APIs, build scalable services, and keep systems performant while handling petabytes of audio data. You’ll own backend architecture and collaborate with product, ML, and operations teams.

The role offers a high-growth environment with hands-on ownership of data pipelines and production-grade deployments using modern stacks like Next.js, Node.js, AWS, and PostgreSQL. Competitive compensation and comprehensive benefits.

Qualifications

• 5+ years backend development building scalable APIs and services.
• Proficient with RESTful APIs, service interfaces, and database design (PostgreSQL, MySQL).
• Strong understanding of distributed systems and service-oriented architecture.
• Extensive cloud infrastructure and infrastructure-as-code experience.
• Proficient in profiling, debugging, and optimizing backend systems.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain production-grade backend services powering data collection to customer insights.
• Own the architecture and performance of distributed systems ingesting and serving audio data at scale.
• Define and evolve internal APIs and service boundaries to support ML and product features.
• Build resilient, observable systems with strong performance characteristics.
• Collaborate with product, operations, and ML teams to rapidly iterate on ideas and ship fast.

Skills

Backend APIs

RESTful APIs

Distributed systems

Cloud & IaC

Profiling & debugging

Tools

Next.js

TypeScript

Node.js

PostgreSQL

AWS

Job description

About David AI

David AI is the first audio data research company. We bring an R&D approach to data-developing datasets with the same rigor AI labs bring to models. Our mission is to bring AI into the real world, and we believe audio is the gateway. Speech is versatile, accessible, and human—it fits naturally into everyday life. As audio AI advances and new use cases emerge, high-quality training data is the bottleneck. This is where David AI comes in.

About David AI

David AI is the first audio data research company. We bring an R&D approach to data-developing datasets with the same rigor AI labs bring to models. Our mission is to bring AI into the real world, and we believe audio is the gateway. Speech is versatile, accessible, and human—it fits naturally into everyday life. As audio AI advances and new use cases emerge, high-quality training data is the bottleneck. This is where David AI comes in.

David AI was founded in 2024 by a team of former Scale AI engineers and operators. In less than a year, we’ve brought on most FAANG companies and AI labs as customers. We recently raised a $50M Series B from Meritech, NVIDIA, Jack Altman (Alt Capital), Amplify Partners, First Round Capital and other Tier 1 investors.

Our team is sharp, humble, ambitious, and tight-knit. We’re looking for the best research, engineering, product, and operations minds to join us on our mission to push the frontier of audio AI.

About Our Engineering Team

At David AI, our engineers build the pipelines, platforms, and models that transform raw audio into high-signal data for leading AI labs and enterprises. We're a tight-knit team of product engineers, infrastructure specialists, and machine learning experts focused on building the world’s first audio data research company.

We move fast, own our work end-to-end, and ship to production daily. Our team designs real-time pipelines handling terabytes of speech data and deploys cutting-edge generative audio models.

About This Role

As a Staff Software Engineer, Platform at David AI, you’ll work across product surfaces to design clean APIs, build scalable services, and keep our systems performant under the weight of petabytes of audio data.

In this role, you will

• Design, build, and maintain production-grade backend services that power everything from data collection to customer-facing insights.


• Own the architecture and performance of distributed systems that ingest, transform, and serve audio data at scale.


• Define and evolve internal APIs and service boundaries to support a growing set of ML and product features.


• Build resilient, observable, and easy-to-debug systems with strong performance characteristics.


• Collaborate with product, operations, and ML teams to rapidly iterate on new product + research ideas and ship fast.

Your background looks like

• 5+ years backend development building scalable APIs and services.


• Proficient with RESTful APIs, service interfaces, and database design (PostgreSQL, MySQL).


• Strong understanding of distributed systems and service-oriented architecture.


• Extensive cloud infrastructure and infrastructure-as-code experience.


• Proficient in profiling, debugging, and optimizing backend systems.

Bonus points if you have

• Experience launching systems from ground up in high-growth environments (preferred).


• Familiarity with event-driven architectures, async processing, or large-scale data pipelines.


• Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines and DevOps best practices.


• Built scalable data pipelines that have facilitated large-scale event-driven workflows across large volumes of audio or video data.


• Scaled up inference and train compute for large scale workloads in a production setting.

Some technologies we work with

Next.js, TypeScript, TailwindCSS, Node.js, tRPC, PostgreSQL, AWS, Trigger.dev, WebRTC, FFmpeg.

Benefits

• Unlimited PTO.


• Top-notch health, dental, and vision coverage with 100% coverage for most plans.


• FSA & HSA access.


• 401k access.


• Meals 2x daily through DoorDash + snacks and beverages available at the office.


• Unlimited company-sponsored Barry’s classes.

Compensation Range: $195K - $315K