Backend Engineer

About the role

We're looking for a Backend Engineer to help build the infrastructure that powers Sola's AI companion. You'll work on real-time voice pipelines, conversation state, and the APIs that connect our mobile apps to the models underneath. The work is technically hard and the user impact is immediate.

What you'll do

• —Design and build scalable APIs and services for real-time AI conversations
• —Own the voice pipeline infrastructure — latency, reliability, and quality
• —Build and maintain data models for conversation memory and user state
• —Collaborate closely with ML and mobile teams to ship end-to-end features
• —Instrument, monitor, and improve production system performance
• —Participate in on-call rotations and help drive incident resolution

What we're looking for

• —4+ years of backend engineering experience in production environments
• —Strong proficiency in Python or Go (we primarily use Python)
• —Experience with real-time systems — WebSockets, gRPC, or streaming APIs
• —Solid understanding of distributed systems, caching, and message queues
• —Comfort with cloud infrastructure (AWS or GCP) and containerised deployments
• —A bias for simplicity — you default to the smallest solution that works

Nice to have

• —Experience with LLM APIs, audio/speech pipelines, or ML serving
• —Prior work at an early-stage startup
• —Familiarity with Postgres, Redis, and Kafka

What we offer

• —Competitive salary + meaningful equity
• —Fully remote with optional offsites
• —Health, dental, and vision coverage
• —Hardware budget and learning stipend
• —Direct access to founders and real ownership over your work