Senior Backend Engineer — AI Voice Agent Platform

About the role

The HOAi team is looking for a skilled backend engineer to own the voice agent backend services, including session lifecycle, call routing, participant management, conversation state, and real-time orchestration. This role involves building streaming pipelines, implementing tool calling, managing integrations, and ensuring reliability and security.

Responsibilities

• Own voice agent backend services: session lifecycle, call routing, participant management, conversation state, and real-time orchestration.
• Build streaming pipelines: integrate and operate STT/TTS and real-time model endpoints; manage latency budgets, backpressure, and jitter.
• Agent runtime + tools: implement tool calling, sandboxed execution, retries/idempotency, rate limits, and per-tenant budgets/quotas.
• Integrate with telephony/RTC providers, calendars/CRMs/support tools, webhooks, and event streams; build durable sync adapters.
• Data platform: model and store transcripts, audio metadata, agent actions, outcomes, evaluations, and audit trails; optimize for query + replay.
• Reliability engineering: set and monitor SLIs/SLOs, build incident response plans, and automate degradation strategies.
• Security and privacy: implement secrets management, least privilege, encryption, data retention controls, PII redaction, and tenant isolation.

Requirements

• 6+ years of backend engineering experience with ownership of production systems.
• Strong distributed systems fundamentals, including queues/workers, caching, and operational best practices.
• Excellent data modeling and API design skills (versioning, contracts, idempotency).
• Comfortable in a high-velocity environment; pragmatic, curious, and outcome-oriented.
• Experience building or operating low-latency systems (real-time streaming, WebSockets, RTC, event-driven architectures).

Qualifications

• Nice to have: Voice/real-time experience (WebRTC/RTC providers, telephony, streaming audio, SIP concepts, jitter/packet loss mitigation), LLM and agent architecture experience (tool calling, planning/execution loops, memory/state, eval harnesses), familiarity with SDKs/frameworks (LiveKit, Twilio/telephony stacks, Vercel AI SDK, LangChain/LangGraph, Anthropic Agents SDK), experience with observability for real-time systems (OpenTelemetry traces spanning streaming + async workflows).

Skills

• Backend engineering
• Distributed systems
• Data modeling
• API design
• Low-latency systems
• Real-time streaming
• Event-driven architectures
• Observability

Benefits

• Medical, Dental, and Vision coverage
• Unlimited Paid Time Off (PTO)
• 401(k) with Company Match
• Remote work flexibility
• Great parental leave benefits
• Named on Inc 5000 list of America’s Fastest Growing Private Companies
• Named on Inc 5000 Vet 100 Private Companies list multiple years in a row
• Winner of Coastal Entrepreneur Award, Technology Category
• Active employee-led Culture Committee
• Ongoing industry and professional development trainings available to all employees
• Leverage the HOAi Way: Shoot for Impossible and Make it Happen, Radical Candor Leads to Humble Excellence, Hire and Develop the Best Talent

Pay

TBD

Schedule

Varies based on project needs and company policy.