# Software Engineer
**Company:** [Unusual](https://hotfix.jobs/companies/unusual)
**Location:** San Francisco, CA
**Experience:** 5+ years
**Skills:** C++, Rust, Go, gRPC, Backend Development, Systems Programming, Cloud Infrastructure, API Integrations, Streaming Systems, Ml Systems
**Posted:** 2026-06-24
> Generalist software engineer building and maintaining platform APIs, infrastructure, and real-time streaming systems for voice AI models at a startup. Requires 5+ years experience and strong backend fundamentals.
## Job Description
## What You'll Own

- Platform APIs: authentication, billing, account management, and the surface that keeps the business running.
- Feature work across the stack — supporting the rollout of the next generation of our TTS and end-to-end speech models.
- Integration and migration work as Rime evolves: token-based authentication, new billing and metering providers.
- Maintenance and hardening of the current TTS API stack and assisting in its evolution.
- Realtime, low-latency, horizontally scalable streaming speech infrastructure.

## What We're Looking For

- 5+ years of IC engineering experience with strong backend fundamentals.
- Experience with at least one low level language: C++, Rust, Go.
- Systems-level thinking: you understand what's happening at the network, storage, and runtime layers, not just the application layer.
- You build clean interfaces and design for loose coupling; you don't create systems only you can debug. Bias towards codification and reproducibility.
- Comfortable moving through an unfamiliar codebase and shipping without extensive hand-holding.
- Strong async written communication — we're global and the written word is how work gets done.

## Bonus Points

- Experience integrating 3rd party API’s, such as payments, monitoring, and CRMs.
- Experience with gRPC or other bidirectional binary streaming protocols.
- Experience with multilingual monorepos where you pick the best language out of merit more than personal experience.
- Experience with cloud infrastructure.
- Experience at a small startup where the scope of your role was broad and undefined.
- Comfort working within ML systems.
**Apply:** https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/software-engineer-at-unusual-ca87f23a-3017-405f-a78f-49b708f9ff16
**Canonical:** https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/software-engineer-at-unusual-ca87f23a-3017-405f-a78f-49b708f9ff16