Algorithmic Backend Engineer

Location: San Francisco, CA, us

Company Description

We want to radically improve how we humans communicate with each other. Our first step at Ava is to empower 450M deaf and hard-of-hearing people to live in a fully accessible world.

Every day, millions of people are excluded from conversations because they cannot hear what others say well. Our CEO Thibault grew up in a Deaf family & witnessed firsthand how the world was not accessible for them. Together with our CTO Skinner — deaf since age 2 — Thibault co-founded Ava to make live captioning of conversations as easy as turning on captions on TV.

Our small but fast-growing team has reinvented AI-based speech recognition technology to be in service of people who need it the most. We dream of a 24/7 accessible world, without any communication barrier.

In this pursuit, we're seeing how critical communication skills are, yet very far from ideal, to unleash our collective potential. This is for us the last barrier to be lifted.

Our belief is that well-designed technology can help everyone communicate and connect better — much more effectively and authentically — so humanity can achieve the greatest things together.

We want to make the seemingly impossible equation of collaboration 1 + 1 = 3, work every time. In other words, make 1 & 1 = 3 a reality.

Job Description

Build the infrastructure of human connection with us.

Why this Role?

• Actually change lives at an unprecedented scale: How often do you hear about apps that make people cry of joy? It is really for us a unique opportunity and privilege to be able to meaningfully improve the lives of 100,000s of people - and yet to still be at the very beginning of our mission!
• Join us at an incredible time: We're well-funded and hit product-market fit, which gives us a huge green field to work with. You'd join at the perfect time to shape what we build and how we grow, so we can create a more inclusive world.
• Work with some of the best people in the world: We have an incredibly talented and passionate team that is a lot of fun to work with. We're still super small and have accomplished some things that were thought impossible!
• Tackle our most interesting and impactful problems: Our team is still small, and people wear many hats. You'd jump between product, marketing, internal tools, process — participating in every phase from inception to implementation. Absolutely no boredom.

So... what will you do as a Backend Engineer at Ava?

• You'll help scale Ava as a key communication service millions of deaf/hard-of-hearing users & their peers can rely on.
• You'll design and build a reliable and performant infrastructure on projects - such as improving the reliability of our realtime audio & text sync service.
• You'll conceive algorithms to accommodate real time multi-editing and audio processing.
• You'll write our new API to accelerate & build integrations with multiple complementary productivity & communication services.
• You'll be designing and improving key security features to keep Ava safe for all, including for our professional users.

Qualifications

• You have experience scaling production software. You've worked on a product experiencing rapid growth and understand what needs to be done to scale to the next level.
• You can readily learn most technologies as you go. To you, technologies are about tools and tradeoffs, not an ideology.
• You care about the business implications of anything you build. You're not just going after cool stuff — you understand the balance between craft, speed, and the bottom line.
• You're fluent with Typescript, NodeJS, bash, Python (basics), algorithmic basics, AWS, Jenkins, Docker, Terraform.
• Bonus: You have dabbled into React.js
• Bonus: You've spent meaningful time as a senior engineer or tech lead — or even better, you've managed a team before.

Additional Information

All your information will be kept confidential according to EEO guidelines.