Founding Software Engineer (Backend)

Intro

Scout AI is a new hiring platform that connects software engineers to opportunities with world-class companies. On Scout, you get a more relevant and growthful interviewing experience, you receive feedback on your performance, and you also get end-to-end support to improve your chances of getting hired.

If you perform well on the Scout interview, you become eligible for opportunities with all companies in the Scout network (only complete the interview once).

This role is with our partner company that is actively hiring:
Sela

About the company

Sela is an AI phone agent that can conduct open-ended phone sales conversations really effectively.

Compared to other voice AI agents, our architecture makes it 10x easier to sculpt and adjust the way our agent responds to pivotal moments in conversations, producing more polished responses and better conversion rates than human call center agents.

We are well funded ($6M seed from a top VC) and are building the core engineering team in SF.

About the Role

This is a high-growth, hands-on technical leadership role. You will work closely with the founders to continuously re-think and re-design Sela's various backend services as we scale to millions of phone calls a day. You will also participate in hiring and serve as a tech lead for more junior engineers.

Reasons to work with us

• You get to work at the cusp of what's technically possible in applied AI. The low latency requirements of realtime speech means that our entire stack has to be lightning fast. Building our agents comes with a very specific joy of creating something rich, interactive, and lifelike. The fundamental problem is super challenging and super rewarding.
• We have the right raw ingredients to become a large generational company. Around 2% of the US works in phone sales (~$250B in salaries), and the industry will be completely transformed by this technology. The core product offering has tremendous product-market fit, because we're solving something that is core to all these companies. We are starting to roll out our tech to some of the biggest players in the space.
• Work directly with the founders who want to build a great company but also build a fun and rewarding place to work. Nate is a repeat founder (YC alum) and an industry expert. Vahe is an ex-Google tech lead and NLP researcher.

Job responsibilities

• Design and build scalable backend infrastructure to support real-time communication
• Design, build and maintain a public API to be used by Sela's partners
• Design and build integrations with 3rd party software such as CRMs, Dialers, calendars, custom APIs, etc.
• Work with other backend engineers to improve our real-time communication platform
• Lead and mentor a team of more junior engineers
• Work with the devops team to identify the best deployment and scaling strategies
• Work with the frontend engineers to support Sela's user-facing web application
• Work with the ML engineers to support our proprietary AI features

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience in backend system design
• Experience building high QPS public APIs
• Experience in growth stage startups (Seed+ or Series A+)
• Expert knowledge of either Python or Go
• Excellent technical communication skills