Telephony Reliability Engineer

KaiCalls; Northern (KY); Hybrid; USD 140,000 - 185,000; Full time

Job summary

KaiCalls is seeking a seasoned engineer to own programmable voice operations, SIP systems, and carrier integrations, driving observability across call paths and outcomes. You will lead incident response, implement robust runbooks, and shape architecture to reduce recurrence while ensuring reliable porting and failover.

Experience with distributed systems, idempotency, and monitoring is required, along with clear communication under pressure. Remote work from the US is supported.

Qualifications

• Deep production ownership of programmable voice, SIP, or carrier systems.
• Strong distributed-systems debugging and incident leadership.
• Experience with idempotency, retries, failover, and observability.
• Clear communication under pressure.

Responsibilities

• Own SIP, PSTN, programmable voice, call control, phone-number lifecycle, webhooks, recordings, and failover.
• Build observability across call legs, provider receipts, application state, and customer-visible outcomes.
• Lead incidents and reduce recurrence through tests, runbooks, and architecture changes.
• Support porting, forwarding, carrier escalation, and emergency rollback.

Skills

Programmable voice ownership

SIP & carrier systems

Distributed-systems debugging

Incident leadership

Observability

Tools

Node

TypeScript

PostgreSQL

Job description

The mission

Make every KaiCalls call route observable, recoverable, and dependable from carrier ingress through customer outcome.

What you will own

• Own SIP, PSTN, programmable voice, call control, phone-number lifecycle, webhooks, recordings, and failover.
• Build observability across call legs, provider receipts, application state, and customer-visible outcomes.
• Lead incidents and reduce recurrence through tests, runbooks, and architecture changes.
• Support porting, forwarding, carrier escalation, and emergency rollback.

What success looks like

• Service-level indicators exist for routing success, latency, completion, and fallback.
• Carrier and application failures produce actionable alerts.
• Incident reviews produce durable, verified fixes.
• Real inbound and outbound routes are tested before changes are declared proven.

What we are looking for

• Deep production ownership of programmable voice, SIP, or carrier systems.
• Strong distributed-systems debugging and incident leadership.
• Experience with idempotency, retries, failover, and observability.
• Clear communication under pressure.

Helpful, not mandatory

• Twilio and Telnyx experience.
• SIP and RTP diagnostics.
• Number porting, CNAM, and messaging-registration familiarity.
• Node, TypeScript, and Postgres.

Compensation

The base salary range is $140,000-$185,000 USD for a US-remote employee. Final compensation will reflect role level, location policy, experience, benefits, variable compensation where applicable, and equity. Contractor arrangements are scoped separately.

How we evaluate

We use the same core evidence for every candidate: comparable outcomes, ownership, customer judgment, role skill, communication, and learning velocity. The process normally includes a short screen, a paid and bounded work sample, structured interviews, and reference checks.

Example paid work sample: Diagnose a sanitized trace where the carrier leg connected but the business owner's phone never rang. Explain missing evidence, mitigation, permanent repair, and the customer update.

Your first 90 days

1. First 30 days: Map the production call path, risks, and incident history.
2. By 60 days: Establish service indicators, alerts, and top runbooks.
3. By 90 days: Eliminate the leading incident class and run a failover exercise.