Senior Software Engineer, AI Data

Why AssemblyAI

AssemblyAI builds the best-in-class Voice AI models powering the next generation of voice applications. Our models serve 600M+ inference calls monthly, process 1M+ hours of audio daily, and power 2 billion+ end-user experiences. The Voice AI space is at an inflection point; we’re looking for folks truly excited to join a small team and help define the future of the industry.

We are one of the most capital-efficient AI companies on the planet - with under 100 people generating roughly $500K ARR per employee, we sit among the top 5 most revenue-dense teams within the fastest-growing AI companies today. That's not an accident; it's a deliberate choice to stay lean, move fast, and give every person on the team outsized ownership and impact. With thousands of customers including Granola, Fireflies, Figure AI, and CallRail, the company has real scale - processing over 2 million hours of audio daily and handling more than 1 million API calls every day. This is a rare growth-stage opportunity where the business is proven and the trajectory is steep, but the team is still small enough that your fingerprints are on everything.

If you've ever felt buried under layers of bureaucracy, starved of real ownership, or frustrated watching your work disappear into a slow-moving org, AssemblyAI is built differently. The company operates as a true meritocracy, with no heavy planning or approval processes and no gatekeeping on the tools or information you need. For anyone who genuinely cares about voice AI, not as a trend to chase, but as a technology to build,  this is the place where the most interesting problems at the most interesting scale are being solved by a team small enough that you'll actually know everyone's name.

We’re committed to creating a space where our employees can bring their full selves to work and have equal opportunity to succeed. No matter your race, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, religion, origin, ability, age, veteran status, if joining this mission speaks to you, we encourage you to apply!

About the Role

We're seeking an exceptional Senior Software Engineer to join our AI Data team. This role is focused on building robust, scalable systems that power our AI data platform. You’ll work on high-impact projects that directly influence our ability to train and evaluate models at scale, with a strong emphasis on software engineering excellence, system reliability, and code quality.

As a Senior Engineer, you'll drive technical execution within your team, taking ownership of significant features and components. You should be passionate about writing clean, maintainable code, implementing comprehensive testing strategies, and continuously improving engineering practices. This role requires close collaboration with researchers, platform engineers, and other stakeholders. You'll need to balance technical excellence with pragmatic delivery in a fast-paced startup environment. 

What You’ll Do

Architect Next-Gen AI Data Infrastructure

• Design scalable, future-proof data platforms optimized for AI research workloads
• Build efficient self-serve data processing pipelines leveraging GCP's advanced services
• Implement cost-effective storage and monitoring solutions for ML at scale
• Create flexible training resource management with intelligent queuing
• Optimize resource allocation for maximum training efficiency
• Participate in on-call rotation to ensure system reliability

Advance Technical Excellence

• Lead adoption of cutting-edge ML tools and frameworks, continuously evaluating and integrating best-in-class solutions
• Streamline existing workflows while introducing new tooling that further reduces complexity
• Enhance our tooling and documentation to accelerate team velocity and maintain our competitive edge
• Implement guardrails for cost, quality, and performance
• Identify and eliminate technical bottlenecks in the data processing and training pipelines

What You’ll Need

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience
• Strong proficiency in Python and SQL with demonstrated ability to write production-quality code
• Solid understanding of software engineering fundamentals:
• Data structures and algorithms
• System design and architectural patterns
• Testing strategies (unit, integration, end-to-end)
• Code review practices and technical collaboration
• Experience with:
• RESTful APIs and distributed systems concepts
• Containerization (Docker) and basic cloud infrastructure
• Track record of delivering high-quality software in a team environment
• Ability to thrive in a startup environment with changing priorities and rapid iteration

Preferred

• Experience with GCP services (BigQuery, GCS, Cloud Run, GKE)
• Familiarity with distributed processing frameworks (Apache Beam, PySpark)
• Experience with workflow orchestration tools (Airflow, Prefect, Dagster)
• Understanding of ML/AI infrastructure and data pipelines
• Experience with monitoring and observability tools (Datadog)
• Experience working with researchers directly
• Background in data engineering roles

What We're Looking For

This role requires someone who is:

• Excellent at software fundamentals - You write code that others want to emulate
• Quality-focused - You care deeply about testing, documentation, and maintainability
• Customer-aware - You understand how your work impacts research experience and business outcomes
• Collaborative - You work well with diverse stakeholders and help others succeed
• Growth-minded - You're curious, eager to learn, and want to expand into platform and infrastructure engineering
• Pragmatic - You balance perfection with delivery and understand trade-offs in a fast paced environment
• Team-oriented - You improve not just the code, but the team's overall effectiveness
• Reliable - You build systems that customers depend on for their critical operations

We're looking for the best person for this role - someone who can hit the ground running while growing with the team. The ideal candidate brings strong software engineering discipline and is excited to apply those skills to the unique challenges of data engineering at scale to support our model development lifecycle.

Pay Transparency:

AssemblyAI strives to recruit and retain exceptional talent from diverse backgrounds while ensuring pay equity across our team. Our salary ranges are set to be competitive for our size, stage, and industry, and reflect just one component of the full compensation, benefits, and rewards we offer.

Salary determinations consider a variety of factors, including relevant experience, technical depth, skills demonstrated during the interview process, and maintaining internal equity with peers on the team. The range shared below represents a general expectation for the posted position. However, we are open to considering candidates who may fall above or below the outlined experience level—in those cases, we will communicate any adjustments to the expected salary range.

• Germany / Ireland: €141,267 – €184,512
• United Kingdom: £117,159 – £153,024

AI to Interview:

If you’re selected for an interview, please review this resource to better understand how AssemblyAI approaches the use of AI in our interview process.

GDPR privacy notice:

Candidates from the EU should review this job applicant privacy notice before applying. 

Keep Exploring AssemblyAI:

Speech-to-text | Streaming speech-to-text | Speech Understanding | LLM Gateway
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Our $50M Series C fundraise
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