Backend Engineer

About Phonic

Phonic is a product and research lab focused on powering the most realistic, human-like voice AI conversations. We've re-thought the entire stack in pursuit of this goal, from models to product, to create voice agents that feel like they truly understand you, respond emotionally and perform agentic tasks with frontier intelligence.

Our team includes top-tier AI researchers, international olympiad medalists, and former founders.

Our customers include companies that are building voice-native AI products in industries such as customer support, healthcare, and logistics. We have raised over $30M from tier 1 VCs

About the Team

Phonic has a very talent-dense and close-knit team. We collaborate with high trust and are constantly trying to improve how we work to deliver world-class research and product. Everyone takes ownership in what they do and they aren’t afraid to dive in headfirst into new problems. Our team includes top-tier AI researchers, international olympiad medalists, and former founders and we’re fully in-person in our SF office.

About The Role

As a Backend Engineer at Phonic, you'll build the critical systems that power real-time voice AI at scale. You'll craft highly reliable, low-latency infrastructure that serves production traffic for hundreds of thousands of mission-critical calls every day. Working directly with product, design, and research teams, you'll ship cutting-edge AI capabilities while maintaining and scaling our infrastructure as we rapidly grow revenue.

What You'll Do

• Build and maintain highly reliable, low-latency systems serving production traffic for hundreds of thousands of mission-critical calls daily

• Work directly with product, design, and research teams to ship cutting-edge AI capabilities to users

• Improve existing products to ensure they are intuitive, sleek, and make innovative use of our research team's latest breakthroughs

• Scale infrastructure to support new traffic as we rapidly grow revenue

What You'll Bring

• 3+ years of professional software engineering experience, or evidence of exceptional ability through at least one standout accomplishment, owning and delivering a non-trivial software system, a substantial personal project with real users, success in a competitive programming contest or hackathon, or a significant open-source contribution

• Strong proficiency in TypeScript

• A bias toward shipping: you believe done is better than perfect

Nice To Have

• You enjoy being customer-facing and get energy from shipping to users

• You're broadly excited by LLMs and the future of AI

• You are a former founder

Benefits

• 💸 Top-tier compensation: in order to get the best talent, we provide salary and equity that recognize your skillset

• 🥗 Meals: free breakfast, lunch, and dinner provided in the office

• 🩺 Healthcare: Comprehensive health, dental, and vision

• 🤝 We have regular off-sites and team celebrations

• 👵 401(k) – Let us help you plan for the future. We’ve got you covered.