Staff Backend Engineer, AI

Summary

Join OpenPhone, a leading VoIP provider, as a Staff Backend Engineer and own the technical strategy for designing, building, and operating AI features across the product. Partner with engineering, product, and security leaders to translate product ideas into scalable systems. Your architectural choices will shape how customers experience AI within OpenPhone. Lead cross-functional delivery of AI features, establish best practices for AI services, and optimize streaming pipelines for real-time data. Mentor engineers, partner with security leaders, and stay current on advancements in AI. OpenPhone offers a competitive salary, equity, extensive medical coverage, a monthly lifestyle stipend, and flexible PTO.

Requirements

• 10+ years of backend or platform engineering experience, including LLM-driven systems in production
• Proven success leading architecture for business-critical services, balancing innovation with operational pragmatism
• Deep knowledge of LLM integration patterns, prompt design, vector search, and agent frameworks
• Expertise in event-driven and streaming architectures; you can reason about concurrency, ordering, and back-pressure under load
• Track record of driving cost optimization, observability, and incident response for AI workloads
• Excellent written and verbal communicator who aligns diverse stakeholders and produces clear, thorough design docs
• Collaborative leader who mentors others, fosters psychological safety, and elevates the entire engineering organization
• Comfortable with ambiguity, you break down complex problems, make informed trade-offs, and deliver iterative value quickly
• Empathetic and customer-focused, you balance technical decisions with user experience and business impact

Responsibilities

• Own the long-term architecture for AI orchestration frameworks, agent-based workflows, and model lifecycle management
• Lead cross-functional delivery of AI features from proof of concept to production rollout, coordinating engineering, product, design, and CX
• Establish best practices for prompt engineering, evaluation, versioning, observability, and incident response for AI services
• Design and optimize low-latency streaming pipelines for speech and other real-time data when the customer experience demands it
• Drive continuous cost, performance, reliability, and security improvements for models and infrastructure
• Mentor engineers through design reviews, code reviews, and technical coaching, raising the bar for excellence across teams
• Partner with security and platform leaders to ensure data privacy, compliance, and operational excellence
• Stay current on advances in LLMs, agent architectures, and emerging tooling, translating insights into actionable roadmap proposals

Benefits

• Extensive medical coverage
• A monthly lifestyle stipend
• A flexible PTO policy