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Salary: USD 190,000 - 225,000 / annual
AssemblyAI is hiring a Senior Software Engineer to bridge cutting-edge AI research and production-grade products. You'll own the full lifecycle of customer-facing APIs that expose new voice AI model capabilities—from prototype through launch and ongoing iteration. The role sits at the intersection of research and applied engineering, requiring you to take proof-of-concept work and transform it into robust, well-documented APIs serving 1M+ users at scale.
Key responsibilities include designing and shipping customer-facing APIs that expose new model capabilities; scaling inference infrastructure to support millions of API users; partnering with researchers to productionize new techniques (converting notebooks and POCs into production-ready systems with appropriate latency, reliability, and ergonomics); collaborating with customers and applied teams to understand product usage patterns and feed insights back into product design and research direction; and contributing across the full stack as needed (backend services, inference infrastructure, SDKs, internal tooling).
You'll need strong backend engineering experience, including building and supporting machine learning infrastructure and/or customer-facing APIs in production environments. The role requires comfort operating with ambiguity—research and product timelines don't always align, and you should be energized rather than frustrated by that dynamic. Genuine curiosity about AI/ML is essential; you don't need to be a researcher, but you should want to understand what models are doing well enough to make sound engineering decisions. Strong collaboration skills are critical, as you'll work daily with researchers, applied engineers, and sometimes customers—people with different contexts and priorities.
AssemblyAI processes 1M+ hours of audio daily, serves 600M+ inference calls monthly, and powers 2B+ end-user experiences. The company operates as a lean, capital-efficient organization with under 100 people generating ~$500K ARR per employee—among the top 5 most revenue-dense teams in fast-growing AI. This is a rare growth-stage opportunity where the business is proven and trajectory is steep, but the team remains small enough that your work has outsized ownership and impact.
