Member of Technical Staff, Core Backend

Why We’re Hiring

This Role

What You’ll Do

• Ramp on the StreamModule pipeline and the cork/uncork backpressure model.
• Walk the Oct 15 / Oct 22 DB incidents and the duplicate-message incident.
• Land a scoped pipeline or provider-abstraction improvement.
• Own a slice of the BullMQ → Kafka consolidation.
• Ship event-driven OTEL instrumentation for at least one critical pipeline stage.
• Harden one provider plugin path so a new model can be added without core changes.
• Drive a measurable reliability or latency win on the call path.
• Be the backend owner that agents and FDE teams pull in for design reviews on new providers and pipeline changes.

Must-haves

• You’ve built real-time or streaming systems in production — media pipelines, streaming data, or event-driven backends.
• You’ve debugged a backpressure cascade.
• You have opinions on queue architecture (BullMQ, Kafka, Temporal) and when each is the right fit.
• You’ve built plugin or adapter architectures — extending base classes cleanly, with decoupled implementations.
• You’ve operated Postgres at scale: connection pooling, read replicas, schema migrations (Liquibase or similar).
• You instrument with OpenTelemetry and think in event-driven traces, not just logs.

Nice-to-haves

• TypeScript + Node.js + NestJS.

Tech Stack

• Languages: TypeScript on Node.js (primary).
• Framework: NestJS (large codebase).
• Pipeline: StreamModule (VAD → STT → LLM → TTS → Transport), cork/uncork backpressure.
• Queues: BullMQ (current), Kafka (target — consolidation on roadmap), Temporal.
• Database: Postgres (connection pooling, read replicas), Liquibase for schema migrations.
• Plugin system: provider abstractions — LLM, STT, TTS base classes (pluggable, decoupled from model integrations).
• Observability: OpenTelemetry tracing, event-driven instrumentation.

Where You Likely Come From

• A streaming or real-time platform (Discord, Slack, Zoom, Twitch, Mux, LiveKit), an ML-infra company (Modal, Baseten, Replicate, Together), or a pipeline/workflow shop (Temporal, Stripe Radar, trading systems).

Weak fit

• Backend engineer who’s only built systems where users don’t wait in real time (overnight jobs, reports, dashboards).

What We Offer

• Real stake: We offer a competitive salary and excellent equity ownership.
• Comprehensive health coverage: medical, dental, and vision plans.
• Team love: We love hanging out, and we do quarterly off-sites.
• Flexible time off: take what you need.
• More: catered meals, transportation, gym, and a $10k annual L&D budget.