Job Summary:
Cartesia is pioneering AI that learns from and interacts with the world like humans do. They are seeking a Software Engineer, Agents to build the backend platform for their voice agents product, focusing on distributed systems, latency, reliability, and developer experience.
Responsibilities:
โข Build and operate the distributed systems behind Cartesia's voice agents: load balancing servers, workers, and the realtime media pipelines that tie them together.
โข Take projects from spec to production: design, build, ship, monitor, iterate.
โข Make the architectural calls that compound over time โ latency budgets, reliability targets, scaling primitives โ and clearly articulate the tradeoffs.
โข Define the developer experience for engineers building on Cartesia: APIs, observability, and applied evaluations.
Qualifications:
Required:
โข 3+ years building distributed backend systems in production, ideally at a high-growth startup. We care more about what you've shipped than strict YOE.
โข Strong product instincts for platform work - you think in customer-facing latency, reliability, and developer experience, and you have opinions on what to build and why.
โข Second-order thinking about backend architecture - you can explain why a design choice was made and what it trades off.
โข Fluent, day-to-day use of AI coding tools, and a habit of keeping pace with the frontier.
โข A strong communicator with both technical and non-technical audiences; comfortable writing clear specs and contributing actively in design reviews.
Preferred:
โข Experience with Go and/or Python in a backend platform context.
โข Realtime media systems in production (WebRTC, SIP, RTP, low-latency audio)
โข Deep experience with cloud and infra primitives (Kubernetes, Docker, NATS, gRPC, OpenTelemetry and modern observability stacks).
โข Distributed systems at scale dealing with non-trivial throughput, autoscaling, multi-region architectures.
โข Voice agents or agent framework experience (Pipecat, LiveKit, OpenAI Agents SDK, Claude SDK, Vercel AI SDK).
Company:
Cartesia provides real-time multimodal intelligence for all devices. Founded in 2023, the company is headquartered in San Francisco, USA, with a team of 51-200 employees. The company is currently Early Stage.