Staff Software Engineer, Infrastructure (ML and Real-Time Speech)

The Opportunity

We’re looking for an experienced Staff Software Engineer to join a team that empowers you to grow, be your authentic self, and do your best work every day. At Otter, we’ve built a platform that simplifies note taking, saves time, improves productivity and accessibility, and makes collaboration effortless. If this mission resonates with you, let’s talk.

We need your help building the infrastructure that powers some of the most advanced multi-language automatic, speech recognition (ASR) and real-time speaker identification systems on the market. You’ll design and scale the backend platforms that bring cutting-edge speech AI to life, working shoulder-to-shoulder with our machine learning researchers and product managers to deliver resilient, high-performance systems that enable real-time, multilingual AI experiences at scale.

If you’re passionate about building rock-solid infrastructure for AI-driven products, enjoy solving complex distributed-systems problems, and want your work to have an immediate impact on millions of users, this is your opportunity.

Your Impact

• Design, build, and operate backend services that power real-time, multi-language, ASR and speaker identification features.
• Architect scalable, fault-tolerant infrastructure across databases, queues, and pub/sub systems to support low-latency ML workflows.
• Partner with ML teams to apply models into production (training pipelines, model deployment, versioning, and monitoring) for real-time and batch inference.
• Improve system observability, reliability, and performance for large-scale speech data ingestion and streaming.
• Contribute to the evolution of our platform architecture, including microservices, orchestration (Kubernetes), and API integrations.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to streamline developer experience, CI/CD pipelines, and automated testing for ML-backed services.

We’re Looking for Someone Who

• Has 10+ years of experience designing and building scalable backend systems and distributed infrastructure.
• Is fluent in Python (bonus for C++) and familiar with building high-performance services.
• Understands data structures, algorithms, distributed systems, and operating systems at a deep level.
• Has worked with databases (SQL & NoSQL), queuing systems, and pub/sub solutions, and knows what’s happening “under the hood.”
• Has experience with ML infrastructure / MLOps (e.g., model deployment, feature stores, pipelines) or is eager to learn quickly.
• Enjoys collaborating with ML engineers and product teams to translate research into production-ready systems.
• Thrives in a fast-paced environment where innovation and reliability go hand in hand.

Nice to Haves

• Experience with real-time streaming frameworks (Kafka, Pulsar, Flink).
• Hands-on experience with container orchestration (Kubernetes, ECS).
• Familiarity with SDK integrations or developer platform design.
• Experience building or optimizing speech/voice AI pipelines.

About Otter.ai 

We are in the business of shaping the future of work. Our mission is to make conversations more valuable.

With over 1B meetings transcribed, Otter.ai is the world’s leading tool for meeting transcription, summarization, and collaboration. Using artificial intelligence, Otter generates real-time automated meeting notes, summaries, and other insights from in-person and virtual meetings - turning meetings into accessible, collaborative, and actionable data that can be shared across teams and organizations. The company is backed by early investors in Google, DeepMind, Zoom, and Tesla.

Otter.ai is an equal opportunity employer. We proudly celebrate diversity and are committed to building an inclusive and accessible workplace. We provide reasonable accommodations for qualified applicants throughout the hiring process.  

Accessibility & Accommodations

Otter.ai is committed to providing reasonable accommodations for candidates with disabilities in our hiring process.  If you need assistance or an accommodation during any stage of the recruitment process, please contact hr@otter.ai at least 3 business days before your interview.

*Otter.ai does not accept unsolicited resumes from 3rd party recruitment agencies without a written agreement in place for permanent placements. Any resume or other candidate information submitted outside of established candidate submission guidelines (including through our website or via email to any Otter.ai employee) and without a written agreement otherwise will be deemed to be our sole property, and no fee will be paid should we hire the candidate.

Salary range

Salary Range: $210,000 to $275,000.00 USD per year.

This salary range represents the low and high end of the estimated salary range for this position. The actual base salary offered for the role is dependent on several factors. Our base salary is just one component of a comprehensive total rewards package.