Member of Technical Staff, Core Backend
Owns the StreamModule voice pipeline (VAD→STT→LLM→TTS) for real-time call agents. Consolidates BullMQ to Kafka, hardens provider abstractions, adds OTEL tracing, and eliminates Postgres SPOFs.
About the job
What You’ll Do
30 Day:
- Ramp on the StreamModule pipeline and the cork/uncork backpressure model
- Walk the Oct 15 / Oct 22 DB incidents and the duplicate-message incident
- Land a scoped pipeline or provider-abstraction improvement
60 Day:
- Own a slice of the BullMQ → Kafka consolidation
- Ship event-driven OTEL instrumentation for at least one critical pipeline stage
- Harden one provider plugin path so a new model can be added without core changes
90 Day:
- Drive a measurable reliability or latency win on the call path
- Be the backend owner that agents and FDE teams pull in for design reviews on new providers and pipeline changes
Requirements
Must-haves:
- Built real-time or streaming systems in production — media pipelines, streaming data, or event-driven backends
- Debugged a backpressure cascade
- Opinions on queue architecture (BullMQ, Kafka, Temporal) and when each is the right fit
- Built plugin or adapter architectures — extending base classes cleanly, with decoupled implementations
- Operated Postgres at scale: connection pooling, read replicas, schema migrations (Liquibase or similar)
- Instrument with OpenTelemetry and think in event-driven traces, not just logs
Nice-to-haves:
- TypeScript + Node.js + NestJS experience
Tech Stack
- Languages: TypeScript on Node.js (primary)
- Framework: NestJS
- Pipeline: StreamModule (VAD → STT → LLM → TTS → Transport), cork/uncork backpressure
- Queues: BullMQ (current), Kafka (target), Temporal
- Database: Postgres (connection pooling, read replicas), Liquibase for schema migrations
- Plugin system: Provider abstractions — LLM, STT, TTS base classes (pluggable, decoupled from model integrations)
- Observability: OpenTelemetry tracing, event-driven instrumentation
Compensation & Benefits
- Competitive salary and excellent equity ownership
- Comprehensive health coverage: medical, dental, and vision plans
- Quarterly off-sites
- Flexible time off
- Catered meals, transportation, gym
- $10k annual L&D budget
Skills
TypeScript, Node.js, Nestjs, Kafka, Bullmq, Postgres, OpenTelemetry, Temporal, Liquibase, Streaming Systems
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