Principal Backend Engineer

Role: Principal Backend Engineer

Salary: $160k to $240k+

Equity: Negotiable

Presence is a funded AI startup that is building a consumer-facing live digital avatar application. We are in closed testing with a 1M user funnel with our beta, and are looking for someone to help polish and scale our system.

We are a small, fully remote team comprised of senior engineers, designers, and product-oriented entrepreneurs who have scaled consumer-facing ventures prior to Presence.

As a Principal Backend Engineer, you will develop, maintain, and scale high performance backend systems that power our products. You will also maintain and develop our realtime lip sync / AI pipeline. You will help hire, manage, and mentor your own team of senior engineers, while collaborating with our Head of Product, designer, and other engineers.

If you're passionate about building products from zero to one, are relentless about detail-orientation and delivering high quality, and want to work with the latest technologies in multimodal AI, this role could be for you.

Who we're looking for:

• 10+ years of experience in backend development, building scalable and reliable applications
• Strong proficiency in Python and experience with concurrency in Python
• Experience with database technologies such as PostgreSQL
• Expertise in designing and integrating APIs, including REST and GraphQL
• Understanding of microservices architecture and serverless environments
• Hands-on experience building, deploying and optimizing GPU-accelerated workloads (PyTorch, CUDA), LLM integrations, Text-to-Speech (TTS) and Speech-to-Text (STT) pipelines
• Experience with containerization and orchestration tools like Docker
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines
• Strong testing discipline and a track record of maintaining large production codebases
• You measure twice, and cut once

Nice to Haves:

• Experience working with LiveKit/WebRTC
• Fullstack capabilities