We are seeking a talented software engineer with strong experience in backend web services and infrastructure to advance our core mission: using the world’s most advanced technology for emotion understanding to build empathy and goal-alignment into AI. Join us in the heart of New York City, or wherever you are located, and contribute to our endeavor to ensure that AI is guided by human values, the most pivotal challenge (and opportunity) of the 21st century.
About Us
Hume AI is dedicated to building artificial intelligence that is directly optimized for human well-being. We raised a Series B funding round at the beginning of the year and just launched the beta of our next flagship AI model, EVI 2, a foundational audio-language model that drives an empathic AI assistant for any application.
Our models understand subtle tones of voice, word emphasis, facial expression, and more, along with the reactions of listeners. These behaviors reveal our preferences—whether we find things interesting or boring; satisfying or frustrating; funny, eloquent, or dubious. We call learning from these signals “reinforcement learning from human expression” (RLHE). AI models trained with RLHE can serve as better question answerers, copywriters, tutors, call center agents, and more, even in text-only interfaces.
Our goal is to enable a future in which technology draws on an understanding of human emotional expression to better serve human goals. As part of our mission, we also conduct groundbreaking scientific research, publish in leading scientific journals like Nature, and support a non-profit, The Hume Initiative, that has released the first concrete ethical guidelines for empathic AI (www.thehumeinitiative.org). You can learn more about us on our website (https://hume.ai/) and read about us in WIRED, Forbes, and Venturebeat.
About the Role
As a Core Services Engineer, you will work closely with our team of research scientists, machine learning engineers, and designers to improve the services that allow us to deliver expression measurement, expression generation, and empathic foundation models in a number of groundbreaking applications. You will be involved in the design, development and maintenance of AI-powered solutions.
Responsibilities
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Write clear and concise code to extend functionality on our web services.
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Collaborate and grow alongside our engineering team.
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Leverage and read APIs to create new integrations.
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Create tests, metrics and infrastructure to help improve service reliability.
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Design new systems to bring improvements and new facets to our APIs.
Requirements
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3+ years of experience in developing backend services.
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Expertise working with storage and compute on a cloud platform (e.g.Google Cloud, AWS).
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Deep understanding of modern deployment strategies utilizing cloud technologies. (e.g. blue/green, canary deployments, etc).
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Experience using service deployment tooling (e.g. Kubernetes, Docker, Argo).
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Experience in Kotlin/Spring, Typescript/Express, Python/FastAPI, or Rust.
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Experience with building and maintaining highly available SaaS products. Ensuring scalability, performance, and observability.
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Excellent communication and collaboration skills.
Bonus
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Experience with machine learning concepts.
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Experience with relational databases (PostgreSQL, BigQuery, etc).
Application Note
Please apply only to the position that best aligns with your qualifications. If you submit multiple applications or have applied within the past 6 months, only your initial submission will be considered.
Annual Salary
$130,000—$230,000 USD
Top Skills
What We Do
Hume provides easy-to-deploy, science-backed vocal, facial, and language expression models, datasets, and APIs. Our platform gives technologies the ability to be empathic - whether you want to design expressive characters, optimize a digital assistant or conversational AI, conduct clinical research, or detect toxicity on a social media platform.
