Overtone
Founding Backend Engineer
4mo ago
200000 –300000 USD / yearUSASeniorwebrtcapiasyncvoicestreaming
Founding Backend Engineer responsible for building and owning core backend systems for a real-time voice and AI-driven dating experience.
Responsibilities
- As a Founding Backend Engineer at Overtone, you will build and own the core systems behind a new kind of dating experience—one centered on real-time voice, AI-driven insight, and trust. You'll be joining the founding engineering team, with significant responsibility for architecture, reliability, and technical direction as we move from 0→1 and beyond.
- This is a hands-on, high-ownership role. You'll work closely with product, design, and leadership to experiment quickly, ship thoughtfully, and scale systems that operate in a deeply personal and high-trust domain.
Requirements
- Senior/staff level experience as a backend or systems engineer on consumer-facing products
- A strong track record of building from 0→1 and then helping systems scale
- Experience with real-time or streaming systems (voice, video, messaging, or similar)
- Comfort designing fault-tolerant, production-grade systems under real-world constraints
- Strong judgment around security, privacy, and reliability , especially in high-trust products
- Comfort building reliable systems around non-deterministic AI services — you understand that LLM calls are slow, expensive, and can fail in unexpected ways, and you design accordingly
- Enough fluency with ML infrastructure to be a strong partner to an AI engineer — you don't need to write evals, but you need to understand why they matter and how they affect your systems
Conditions
- Salary of $200k to $300k.
- This position will receive meaningful stock options with considerable upside potential. We provide standard benefits such as health insurance, dental insurance, etc.
Other
- Core backend systems: Design and build the foundational backend for a consumer voice-first product, with a focus on clarity, reliability, and long-term flexibility.
- Real-time voice infrastructure: Build and operate systems that support real-time voice interactions, streaming architectures, and low-latency user experiences (e.g., WebRTC or similar technologies).
- Fault-tolerant systems: Design systems that degrade gracefully, recover cleanly, and remain reliable under partial failure—especially in live, user-facing experiences.
- 0→1 product experimentation: Move fast alongside product and design as we explore new interaction models and AI-powered features, iterating frequently and learning from real usage.
- AI-ready infrastructure: Build the platform layer that AI services run on — reliable API contracts, queue-based async pipelines, and graceful failure handling for non-deterministic model outputs. You'll work closely with our AI engineer and need to understand LLM behavior well enough to design resilient systems around it.
- Security & privacy by design: Build with user data protection, privacy, and trust as first-class concerns, not afterthoughts.
- System observability & scaling: Implement monitoring, logging, and alerting; identify bottlenecks early; and evolve the system to scale as usage grows.
- Technical ownership: Help set engineering standards, make architectural tradeoffs, and establish a culture of pragmatic, high-quality engineering.
- We look for these qualities in everyone we hire at Overtone.
- Curiosity: You seek to understand before you decide. You ask thoughtful questions, test assumptions, and stay open to changing your mind as new information emerges.
- Craft: You care deeply about quality and coherence. You simplify complexity, exercise good judgment, and take pride in work that feels intentional, thoughtful, and well-made.
- Collaboration: You engage with others honestly and generatively. You challenge ideas with respect, listen deeply, and help synthesize perspectives into clearer, better outcomes.
- Care: You take responsibility for people and outcomes. You act with integrity, follow through on commitments, and protect trust—with users, teammates, and the work itself.
- Overtone, led by the founder and former CEO of Hinge, is building a new kind of dating service – one that cuts through the noise and helps daters find someone who truly resonates. We’re building a team who are excited to work together in person in our NYC office.