Senior Backend Developer

Posted May 15

About Us

Voiceflow is the leading collaborative conversational AI platform.

Our collaboration platform makes it easy for conversational AI product teams to quickly design, test, ship and iterate on conversational assistants - together, faster, at scale.

Assistants designed and built with Voiceflow span hundreds of use cases, from drive thrus to in-car assistants, call centres and more. Voiceflow is loved by over 80,000 global teams with some of the world’s largest companies as customers including Google, BMW, US Bank, McDonalds, JP Morgan, Spotify, Amazon, Home Depot, Best Buy, John Hopkins, and thousands of others.

We’re biassed of course, but we think we’re building one of the coolest products in the world. Put this claim to the test and try out Voiceflow’s free version yourself - give it a try!

Joining a new company is one of the biggest decisions we all make in life as we’re investing our most important resource - our time. At Voiceflow, we’re investing our time here because we believe in an inevitable future where many of the conversations we have with brands everyday will be increasingly automated. If that’s the future we’re all going to be a part of, then the world needs Voiceflow to ensure the teams building these conversational experiences have great tools to craft great experiences. Think of us like the Adobe creative suite for the growing world of conversational AI. You can learn more about our vision of the future here.

We’ve raised $25M USD the past 2 years from some of the world’s best investors including Felicis, Craft, True, Amazon, Google & CEOs of Figma, Webflow, Eventbrite, InVision, Product Hunt, and more. We’re a small, fast growing remote team of around 35 team members from around the world, composed of dedicated and talented individuals with a core focus on engineering and product.

About the Role

How do we scale a conversational AI platform as assistants become more capable?

That's the question we'd like your help to answer at Voiceflow. We currently have 100,000+ teams using the platform along with numerous enterprises and are focused on improving their experiences in building voice and chat apps.

We're looking for a Senior Backend Engineer to join our Data Services team to design and build the next generation of our data processing, storage and serving layers. These layers would involve a combination of static, multimedia and ML powered content. This is a unique opportunity to join a team focused on creating the platform that will help Voiceflow scale 100x.

You'll work with our ML and Data Services Leads to build the first version of the platform and iterate on it as we add more use cases. As a services team, your first customer will be a front end team responsible for serving platform content to end users. You can read about some of the articles we’ve written about our platform: How Voiceflow uses monorepos, Building Voiceflow’s Engineering Platform.

What we currently have

  • A backend capable of handling multimedia data (test, images, voice) at the foreseeable scale
  • A robust CI/CD system, developer tooling and backend patterns
  • An exciting (and realistic) product roadmap
  • Great engineering team

What you’ll do

  • Build a 0 to 1 knowledge base platform with a small team
  • Work with a first version of requirements provided by the PM
  • Architect and build the backend systems on how existing Voiceflow services will interact with data ingestion, retrieval, embedding, tagging and search workflows
  • Help existing customer use their data to build assistants faster
  • Iterate quickly on designs based on technical and business constraints
  • Scale a chosen design for production
  • Set the foundation for a terabyte scale we haven’t seen yet, considering cost, latency, reliability and security

About You

  • Experience building modern, production grade Python web APIs including security, scale, integrations, documentation considerations
  • Ability to create well designed APIs with Python frameworks (FastAPI, Flask, Django etc)
  • Comfortable building both throw-away and highly maintainable code
  • Comfortable building integrations with several types of datasources (examples include Vector bases like Pinecone, Static storage like S3, Data warehouses like Snowflake, etc)
  • Experience writing good unit and integration tests

Nice to have:

  • Familiarity with the Conversational AI space
  • Experience with Terraform/Cloud Formation and AWS/GCP
  • Experience with data technologies like vector databases or modern data warehouses
  • Understanding of Language Models
  • Understanding of Application security

Our Process

  • Application - All candidates will hear back, either to move ahead and schedule an interview or to let you know we aren't moving ahead. No ghosting!
  • Role Screening Call - a 30-minute call with Denys (ML Lead) to learn more about the role, our company and align on expectations for the role.
  • Culture Screening Call — a 30-minute call with Aamna (Head of People) to share more about Voiceflow, our team & culture, and learn about you.
  • Take Home Assignment Interview - a 90-minute call with Denys (ML Lead) and Frank (Director of Engineering) to review a take home assignment you’ll be asked to complete focused on understanding your problem solving and technical skill sets
  • Final Interview - you’ll have the chance to meet with Braden (CEO) to learn more about the future of Voiceflow.
  • Offer — this is the part where we all celebrate!

Logistics

  • Location — we are located in Toronto and operate on a Hybrid model where our team comes into the office 1-2 days per week.
  • Timeline — we are aiming to have our process completed and an offer made by the end of May 2023.

Why Voiceflow

  • Work with a well-funded yet small, hard working team filled with brilliant, passionate people.
  • Take ownership over your work and build momentum on important projects both assigned to you, and of your own choosing.
  • You choose where you work–from your home, the beach, an office, or through our WeWork global membership program.
  • Bi-weekly Team All-Hands, Social Hours, team bonding games, and more. Keeping our teams engaged, even in the remote world.
  • Supporting continued growth with Learning & Development and Lunch & Learn opportunities.
  • Competitive salaries, equity options, full benefits from day one, WFH equipment budget and paid development - we’ve got you covered!
  • Realistic company valuation that gives your equity real, meaningful upside.
  • Supporting new hires by providing opportunities to participate in a Voiceflow Bootcamp where you receive one-on-one support to learn the ins and outs of our product.

Perks are nice, but perks don’t make a company or individual successful - the work does. At Voiceflow, we’re building a product that can help teams work together to rapidly design, prototype and launch conversational assistants for any channel. While you’re building for our customers, we’re building for you.

Voiceflow is an equal opportunity employer. We believe that our commitment to diversity & inclusion will enable us to build better digital experiences for our clients and their customers. We are dedicated to fostering a global team that reflects the diversity of the Voiceflow community. We consider employment applicants without regard to age, race, color, national origin, citizenship, religion, creed, sex, sexual orientation, veteran status, marital status, disability status, or any other protected status.

If you have any special needs or accessibility requirements, please let us know. We will do our utmost to accommodate, in accordance with applicable local legislation.