Overtone

Founding Backend Engineer

New York City

Sponsorship not specified$200k-$300kDetected 159 days ago

Machine LearningLLMsA/B TestingDesign SystemsSystems EngineeringVoIPLeadershipCollaboration

About the role

You'll be joining the founding engineering team, with significant responsibility for architecture, reliability, and technical direction as we move from 0→1 and beyond.
This is a hands-on, high-ownership role.

Core backend systems: Design and build the foundational backend for a consumer voice-first product, with a focus on clarity, reliability, and long-term flexibility.
Real-time voice infrastructure: Build and operate systems that support real-time voice interactions, streaming architectures, and low-latency user experiences (e.g., WebRTC or similar technologies).
Fault-tolerant systems: Design systems that degrade gracefully, recover cleanly, and remain reliable under partial failure-especially in live, user-facing experiences.
AI-ready infrastructure: Build the platform layer that AI services run on - reliable API contracts, queue-based async pipelines, and graceful failure handling for non-deterministic model outputs.
You'll work closely with our AI engineer and need to understand LLM behavior well enough to design resilient systems around it.
Security & privacy by design: Build with user data protection, privacy, and trust as first-class concerns, not afterthoughts.
System observability & scaling: Implement monitoring, logging, and alerting
A strong track record of building from 0→1 and then helping systems scale

Senior/staff level experience as a backend or systems engineer on consumer-facing products
Experience with real-time or streaming systems (voice, video, messaging, or similar)
Comfort designing fault-tolerant, production-grade systems under real-world constraints

Salary of $200k to $300k.
We look for these qualities in everyone we hire at Overtone.
Curiosity: You seek to understand before you decide.
You ask thoughtful questions, test assumptions, and stay open to changing your mind as new information emerges.
Craft: You care deeply about quality and coherence.
You simplify complexity, exercise good judgment, and take pride in work that feels intentional, thoughtful, and well-made.

This position will receive meaningful stock options with considerable upside potential.
We provide standard benefits such as health insurance, dental insurance, etc.
0→1 product experimentation: Move fast alongside product and design as we explore new interaction models and AI-powered features, iterating frequently and learning from real usage.

This listing is sourced directly from Overtone's careers page and normalized into a canonical job model.