About the role
Your Role
As a founding Senior 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 the second engineering hire, 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.
What You’ll Do
- 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 & human-in-the-loop systems: Support systems that integrate LLMs and ML models with human oversight, evaluation workflows, and clear failure handling.
- 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.
