Staff Backend Engineer (Healthcare Voice AI)

A well-funded healthcare technology company is building AI products that listen to clinical conversations through phone and browser apps. It needs a staff-level backend engineer to make long-running, compute-intensive audio and inference pipelines dependable in an early, build-from-nothing setting.

The work

Design, build and run the backend for the company’s audio products, including ingestion of lengthy recordings, media handling, and both live and asynchronous streaming

Own orchestration of multi-step inference pipelines covering transcription, speaker separation, LLMs, clinical extraction and summarization, handling scheduling, queues, retries, timeouts, dead letters, idempotency and replay

Collaborate with clinical, security, AI, product and mobile colleagues so workflows stay reliable on weak networks and offline

Set service-level objectives and instrument workflows thoroughly with structured logs, metrics, tracing, dashboards and alerts

Drive incident response and postmortems until recurring failures disappear

Shape the APIs, data models, deployment pipelines and cloud infrastructure while balancing reliability, latency and cost, and mentor other engineers

Profile

Seven to fifteen years in backend, platform or infrastructure roles (eight or more is typical)

Production distributed systems built and operated at scale

Python or a comparable modern backend language

Currently or recently a staff engineer or tech lead, with a record of measurably improving reliability

Exposure to speech, audio or live-streaming systems, or a healthcare background, is a plus

Hybrid in the South Bay or the San Francisco Bay Area, with at least three days on-site. Visa transfers are considered.