Senior Backend Engineer
San Francisco, CAFull-time$160–220K/yrSeen 2mo agoStill listed 6 days ago
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At a glance
Olive lists jobs from US employers, including remote roles you can work from the United States.
Job overview
David AI is seeking a Senior Backend Engineer to design clean APIs, build scalable services, and maintain high‑performance systems that process terabytes of audio data, collaborating across product, operations, and machine learning teams.
Skills & qualifications
Skills
Qualifications
Benefits
Full job description
About our Engineering team At David AI, our engineers build the pipelines, platforms, and models that transform raw audio into high-signal data for leading AI labs and enterprises. We're a tight-knit team of product engineers, infrastructure specialists, and machine learning experts focused on building the world’s first audio data research company. We move fast, own our work end-to-end, and ship to production daily. Our team designs real-time pipelines handling terabytes of speech data and deploys cutting-edge generative audio models. About this role As a Senior Backend Engineer at David AI, you’ll work across product surfaces to design clean APIs, build scalable services, and keep our systems performant under the weight of terabytes of audio data. In this role, you will
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Design, build, and maintain production-grade backend services that power everything from data collection to customer-facing insights. Own the architecture and performance of distributed systems that ingest, transform, and serve audio data at scale.
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Define and evolve internal APIs and service boundaries to support a growing set of ML and product features.
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Build resilient, observable, and easy-to-debug systems with strong performance characteristics. Collaborate with product, operations, and ML teams to rapidly iterate on new ideas and ship fast.
Your background looks like
- 3+ years backend development building scalable APIs and services.
- Proficient with RESTful APIs, service interfaces, and database design (PostgreSQL, MySQL).
- Strong understanding of distributed systems and service-oriented architecture.
- Extensive cloud infrastructure and infrastructure-as-code experience.
- Proficient in profiling, debugging, and optimizing backend systems.
- Experience launching systems from ground up in high-growth environments (preferred).
Bonus points if you have
- Familiarity with event-driven architectures, async processing, or large-scale data pipelines.
- Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines and DevOps best practices.
- Built scalable data pipelines that have facilitated large-scale event-driven workflows across large volumes of audio or video data.
- Deployed ML models for inference in a production environment.
Some technologies we work with
- Next.js, TypeScript, TailwindCSS, Node.js, tRPC, PostgreSQL, AWS, Trigger.dev, WebRTC, FFmpeg.
Compensation and benefits
- Rapid career growth at one of the fastest growing Series A companies, within a new and booming industry.
- Competitive salary and equity package.
- Flexible PTO policy.
- Top-notch health, dental, and vision coverage with 100% company reimbursement for most plans.
- Paid lunch and dinner in the office, every day through DoorDash.
- 401k access.
How this job compares
Set against the 3,093 open Backend Engineer jobs on Olive Jobs, counted November 2, 2026.
- Pay
- This posting$160–220K/yr
- California median$170–246K/yr811 salary ranges
- US median$152–225K/yr2,467 salary ranges
This range's midpoint, $190K, is 8% below the California median midpoint ($208K) — in the middle half of Backend Engineer salary ranges in California.
- Openings
- Olive Jobs lists 1,062 open Backend Engineer jobs in California and 3,093 across the US. 13% of them nationwide are listed as remote or flexible.
- Experience
- This posting asks for at least 3 years of experience; Backend Engineer postings that state a minimum ask for 5 years at the median (2,554 postings).
- Education
- 812 of the 3,093 open Backend Engineer jobs (26%) ask for a bachelor's degree or higher.
Counted across the open, public US postings on Olive Jobs on November 2, 2026. Pay medians are the middle values of the low ends and of the high ends of postings that list both ends of a range in the same cadence (a yearly salary or an hourly rate); a range's midpoint is halfway between its ends. Pay and experience figures resting on fewer than 20 postings are left out.
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