# Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Product)

**Company:** [Otter](https://hotfix.jobs/companies/otter)
**Location:** Mountain View, CA
**Role:** Backend Engineering
**Salary:** $210k – $275k/yr
**Experience:** 10+ years
**Skills:** System Design, Distributed Systems, Data-Intensive Systems, LLMs, RAG, Prompting, Evaluation Frameworks
**Posted:** 2026-07-07

> Staff backend engineer designing and scaling foundational systems for AI-native product experiences at Otter.ai, including generation pipelines, data models, and evaluation frameworks. Requires 10+ years building complex distributed systems, cross-team leadership, and strong product intuition.

## Job Description

## Responsibilities
- Define system architecture for AI-native product surfaces.
- Design foundational systems (generation pipelines, data models, evaluation frameworks) that power multiple product areas.
- Drive cross-team technical strategy and lead initiatives that span product, AI, and infrastructure teams.
- Establish best practices for AI product engineering, covering evaluation, reliability, iteration loops, and system design.
- Translate ambiguity into scalable systems and product direction.
- Raise the bar across the organization on engineering quality, system design, and product thinking.
- Shape how AI accelerates engineering velocity through adoption of AI-assisted development.

## Requirements
- 10+ years of experience building and scaling complex systems.
- Strong track record of owning technical and product direction for large or ambiguous problem spaces.
- Deep expertise in system design, especially in data-intensive or distributed systems.
- Experience leading cross-team initiatives and influencing without direct authority.
- Strong product intuition and ability to balance user experience, system constraints, and business impact.
- Comfortable operating at a high level of ambiguity and defining both the problem and the solution.

## Nice-to-Haves
- Experience building or experimenting with LLM-powered features (prompting, evaluation, RAG, etc.).
- Experience designing systems that balance latency, cost, and quality.
- Exposure to user feedback loops, experimentation, or evaluation frameworks.

## Compensation
- Salary Range: $210,000 to $275,000 USD per year.
- This salary range represents the low and high end of the estimated salary range for this position. The actual base salary offered for the role is dependent on several factors. Our base salary is just one component of a comprehensive total rewards package.

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