Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Product)

The role

You will define system architecture for AI-native product surfaces and design foundational systems like generation pipelines and data models. You will drive technical strategy across product, AI, and infrastructure teams to build scalable systems.

What you will do

• Define system architecture for AI-native product surfaces
• Design foundational systems including generation pipelines, data models, and evaluation frameworks
• Drive cross-team technical strategy across product, AI, and infrastructure teams
• Establish best practices for AI product engineering
• Translate ambiguity into scalable systems and product direction
• Raise the bar across the organization regarding engineering quality and system design
• Shape how AI accelerates engineering velocity

Required qualifications

• 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 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 have

• 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

About the company

Otter.ai is in the business of shaping the future of work with a mission to make conversations more valuable. It is a tool for meeting transcription, summarization, and collaboration.