engineering
Posted Aug 13, 2025Staff Software Engineer, Platform
at David AI
San Francisco, United StatesOn-site
Responsibilities
- - Own the architecture and performance of distributed systems that ingest, transform, and serve audio data at scale.
- - Build resilient, observable, and easy-to-debug systems with strong performance characteristics.
- - Collaborate with product, operations, and ML teams to rapidly iterate on new product + research ideas and ship fast.
Requirements
- ABOUT DAVID AI David AI is the first audio data research company.
- We bring an R&D approach to data–developing datasets with the same rigor AI labs bring to models.
- Our mission is to bring AI into the real world, and we believe audio is the gateway.
- As audio AI advances and new use cases emerge, high-quality training data is the bottleneck.
- This is where David AI comes in.
- David AI was founded in 2024 by a team of former Scale AI engineers and operators.
- In less than a year, we’ve brought on most FAANG companies and AI labs as customers.
- We’re looking for the best research, engineering, product, and operations minds to join us on our mission to push the frontier of audio AI.
- ABOUT OUR ENGINEERING TEAM At David AI, our engineers build the pipelines, platforms, and models that transform raw audio into high-signal data for leading AI labs and enterprises.
- We're a tight-knit team of product engineers, infrastructure specialists, and machine learning experts focused on building the world’s first audio data research company.
- ABOUT THIS ROLE As a Staff Software Engineer, Platform at David AI, you’ll work across product surfaces to design clean APIs, build scalable services, and keep our systems performant under the weight of petabytes of audio data.
- - Define and evolve internal APIs and service boundaries to support a growing set of ML and product features.
- YOUR BACKGROUND LOOKS LIKE - 5+ years backend development building scalable APIs and services. - Proficient with RESTful APIs, service interfaces, and database design (PostgreSQL, MySQL). - Strong understanding of distributed systems and service-oriented architecture. - Extensive cloud infrastructure and infrastructure-as-code experience. - Proficient in profiling, debugging, and optimizing backend systems.
- Experience launching systems from ground up in high-growth environments (preferred). - Familiarity with event-driven architectures, async processing, or large-scale data pipelines. - Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines and DevOps best practices. - Built scalable data pipelines that have facilitated large-scale event-driven workflows across large volumes of audio or video data. - Scaled up inference and train compute for large scale workloads in a production setting.