Founding Backend Engineer

YOUR ROLE As a Founding Backend Engineer at Overtone, you will build and own the core systems behind a new kind of dating experience—one centered on real-time voice, AI-driven insight, and trust. You'll be joining the founding engineering team, with significant responsibility for architecture, reliability, and technical direction as we move from 0→1 and beyond. This is a hands-on, high-ownership role. You'll work closely with product, design, and leadership to experiment quickly, ship thoughtfully, and scale systems that operate in a deeply personal and high-trust domain. What You’ll Do - Core backend systems: Design and build the foundational backend for a consumer voice-first product, with a focus on clarity, reliability, and long-term flexibility. - Real-time voice infrastructure: Build and operate systems that support real-time voice interactions, streaming architectures, and low-latency user experiences (e.g., WebRTC or similar technologies). - Fault-tolerant systems: Design systems that degrade gracefully, recover cleanly, and remain reliable under partial failure—especially in live, user-facing experiences. - 0→1 product experimentation: Move fast alongside product and design as we explore new interaction models and AI-powered features, iterating frequently and learning from real usage. - AI-ready infrastructure: Build the platform layer that AI services run on — reliable API contracts, queue-based async pipelines, and graceful failure handling for non-deterministic model outputs. You'll work closely with our AI engineer and need to understand LLM behavior well enough to design resilient systems around it. - Security & privacy by design: Build with user data protection, privacy, and trust as first-class concerns, not afterthoughts. - System observability & scaling: Implement monitoring, logging, and alerting; identify bottlenecks early; and evolve the system to scale as usage grows. - Technical ownership: Help set engineering standards, make architectural tra