Aldea · 4 weeks ago
API Engineering Lead
Hybrid (San Francisco, California, US)
Full-time
Hybrid
Senior Level
5+ years expAldea is a multi-modal foundational AI company reimagining the scaling laws of intelligence. They are seeking a highly technical API Engineering Lead to own and drive their API roadmap, focusing on architecture, implementation, and performance improvements across real-time and batch speech APIs.
Artificial Intelligence (AI)SoftwareSpeech Recognition
No H1B
Responsibilities
Own end-to-end design, architecture, and evolution of Aldea’s customer facing and backend APIs
Architect for Scale & Speed: Design and evolve the global control plane for Aldea’s real-time (WebSocket/gRPC) and batch APIs
Productionize ML at the Edge: Build the high-throughput inference layer that wraps our speech models. Optimize for millisecond-level cold starts and efficient GPU utilization
Reliability & Observability: implement distributed tracing (OpenTelemetry) and define strict SLOs for streaming stability (e.g., jitter, connection drop rates)
Security by Design: Lead the implementation of enterprise-grade security (API keys, OAuth2, rate limiting) and compliance controls (SOC2, data retention) for sensitive audio data
Define API standards, versioning, authentication, usage metering
Partner with Research, Product, and Infra to deliver new capabilities
Mentor engineers and set best practices for API engineering
Qualification
Required
5–8 years backend/systems engineering experience
Strong experience building and running production APIs
Deep Proficiency in Go or Rust. (Python is great for modeling, but our hot path needs systems-level performance)
Experience with streaming systems (websockets, gRPC, real-time audio/video)
ML Infrastructure Experience: Familiarity with model serving (Triton, TorchServe, Ray) or orchestrating GPU workloads on Kubernetes/AWS
Deep understanding of distributed systems, performance tuning, async I/O
Cloud Native Fluency: Hands-on experience with AWS (EKS/ECS, Lambda, ElastiCache)
Preferred
Background in speech, audio, DSP, or ML inference pipelines
Experience building SDKs, developer tooling, or API billing/usage systems
Early-stage startup experience
Benefits
Competitive base salary
Equity participation
Comprehensive health, dental, and vision coverage
Flexible paid time off
Company
Aldea
Aldea builds AI voice and language technology with speech-to-text, text-to-speech, and conversational interfaces.
11-50 employees
Funding
Current Stage
Early StageCompany data provided by crunchbase