Staff Engineer (Backend + AI) : Sphere

San Francisco, California, United States

interface.ai is the industry's-leading specialized AI provider for banks and credit unions, serving over 100 financial institutions. The company's integrated AI platform offers a unified banking experience through voice, chat, and employee-assisting solutions, enhanced by cutting-edge proprietary Generative AI.

Our mission is clear: to transform the banking experience so every consumer enjoys hyper-personalized, secure, and seamless interactions, while improving operational efficiencies and driving revenue growth.

interface.ai offers pre-trained, domain-specific AI solutions that are easy to integrate, scale, and manage, both in-branch and online. Combining this with deep industry expertise, interface.ai is the AI solution for banks and credit unions that want to deliver exceptional experiences and stay at the forefront of AI innovation.

About the Role

We are seeking a Staff Engineer for Sphere, our flagship conversational AI platform that powers the most impactful and widely adopted experiences in our ecosystem. Sphere spans intelligent voice agents and next-generation digital assistants—helping millions of users navigate complex, real-world tasks in regulated environments.

As a core engineering leader on this team, you will design, build, and evolve distributed systems and AI pipelines that drive human-like interactions, multimodal memory, and real-time decision-making across speech and chat modalities. This is one of the most mission-critical, revenue-generating platforms in our company, directly shaping the future of user-facing AI in financial services.

What You’ll Do

  • Lead architecture and delivery of high-scale, low-latency backend systems supporting multimodal conversational agents (voice and digital)

  • Build and maintain orchestration logic, memory frameworks, and dynamic routing for real-time, multi-turn AI interactions

  • Design extensible APIs and interaction models that integrate with tools, transactions, and domain-specific workflows

  • Collaborate with ML and infrastructure teams to productionize speech models, reasoning systems, and aligned LLM capabilities

  • Drive improvements in latency, observability, fault-tolerance, and personalization across conversational surfaces

  • Influence technical strategy, mentor engineers, and uphold engineering excellence across product lines

  • Ensure compliance, auditability, and security are first-class considerations in all components and designs

What You Bring

Required

  • 8+ years of experience building backend or platform systems at scale, ideally in real-time or user-facing environments

  • Deep understanding of asynchronous architecture, distributed systems, and event-driven orchestration

  • Experience delivering production systems with real-time performance, stateful flows, and strong reliability guarantees

  • Expertise in one or more backend stacks such as Node.js, Go, or Python, with emphasis on performance and maintainability

  • Track record of working across product and infra teams to build secure, extensible, and AI-enabled systems

  • Strong product instincts and a desire to contribute to platform-level thinking for conversational UX

Preferred

  • Experience with speech or voice systems, LLM-based agents, or multi-modal interface design

  • Familiarity with memory frameworks, dialogue management, and inference orchestration at scale

  • Background in regulated domains or enterprise-grade infrastructure design (security, logging, compliance)

Why This Role Is Unique

  • You'll work on the most impactful, revenue-generating AI products in the company

  • You’ll help shape human-AI interaction at scale, across both synchronous voice and digital interfaces

  • Your work will be foundational to millions of end-user conversations and high-stakes decision-making every day

  • You’ll collaborate with a team that’s pushing the boundary of AI-first interfaces—moving fast, with technical rigor and user empathy

Compensation

The base salary range for this role will be between $210,000 and $240,000. Final compensation will be determined by a variety of factors, including, but not limited to your location, skills, experience, education, and/or professional certifications. During the phone screening, your recruiter will provide the location-specific salary range for this role. Regardless of your personal situation or where you are in the world, Interface.ai offers comprehensive and great benefits programs to meet your needs:

  • Health: medical, dental, and vision insurance and wellbeing resources and programs
  • Time away: Public holidays and discretionary PTO package for flexible days off with manager approval
  • Financial: 401K, ESPP, Basic life and AD&D insurance, long-term and short-term disability
  • Family: parental leave, maternity support, fertility services
  • Development: Access to internal professional development resources.
  • Additional: 24/7 access to professional counselors, voluntary insurance coverage, exclusive perks and discount

At interface.ai, we are committed to providing an inclusive and welcoming environment for all employees and applicants. We celebrate diversity and believe it is critical to our success as a company. We do not  discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, age, sex, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, marital status, veteran status, disability status, or any other legally protected status. All employment decisions at Interface.ai are based on business needs, job requirements, and individual qualifications. We strive to create a culture that values and respects each person's unique perspective and contributions. We encourage all qualified individuals to apply for employment opportunities with Interface.ai and are committed to ensuring that our hiring process is inclusive and accessible.

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