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Senior Backend Engineer

Seattle, WA

Who we are:

Yoodli is a private, personalized and AI powered speech coach. Our dream is to help people around the world improve their communication skills without feeling judged. We’ve raised $7M+ in seed funding from leading investors such as Madrona, AI2, Cercano and other industry experts. Our work has been featured in outlets including WSJ, Inc., and Geekwire. We recently announced a partnership with Toastmasters International to bring AI powered speech coaching to 300k+ members globally. We’re a mission focused and fast growing startup based out of the Allen AI Institute in Seattle. The team includes alumni from GoogleX, Apple, Intuit among others. Here’s a video describing our founding story. You can use the product live (and for free) at www.yoodli.ai.

What we’re hoping you bring:

Mission alignment: You believe in our vision and care deeply about helping people achieve more by communicating better

Backend expertise: You have strong experience building scalable, reliable backend services that power great user experiences

Customer-centric thinking: You architect right-sized solutions - secure, maintainable, and built with the end user in mind

Craft and quality: You hold yourself to a high bar for code quality and system design, and you make the engineers around you better

This role is hybrid with an expectation of 3 days a week in the office - you’ll need to be based in the Greater Seattle Area.

About you:

  • 5+ years of professional development experience, shipping production code
  • Strong backend capabilities - you've owned services end-to-end and have a track record of delivering in fast-moving environments
  • Solid experience with cloud infrastructure (GCP, AWS, or Azure) and Infrastructure as Code
  • Proficiency in TypeScript or Python, with the ability to debug complex distributed systems
  • Clear communicator who works well across engineering and product, and who gives and receives feedback well
  • You understand how your work connects to business outcomes and user impact
  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or equivalent experience

Extra credit experience:

  • Experience with LLMs, generative AI, and AI-powered applications
  • Speech/audio processing technologies and real-time communication systems
  • NoSQL databases and Kubernetes
  • Google Cloud Platform

What’s in it for you?

  • Huge impact opportunity: Define technical strategy and build foundational systems at a fast-growing startup
  • Competitive compensation: Significant equity opportunities at a venture-backed company
    • Base compensation: $160k - $190k 
  • Work directly with the founding team and shape the future of AI-powered communication coaching
  • Join a fun, inclusive and highly motivated team culture (and help define it!)

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