Staff Engineer

Company Summary:

Slang.ai is redefining customer engagement through conversational AI, making every interaction seamless and efficient. Our mission is to transform the restaurant industry by providing the ultimate voice AI solution for consistently outstanding customer experiences. At Slang.ai, we foster a culture of innovation, inclusivity, and growth, ensuring that every "Slangsta" (employee) feels valued and connected to our broader AI driven impact.

What Your Experience Will Be: 

At Slang you would be among our most senior software engineers, driving the development of robust, scalable backend systems that power conversational solutions for full-service restaurants. In this role, you'll leverage your deep JVM expertise and domain-driven design principles to architect and implement systems that seamlessly blend telephony, cloud infrastructure, and AI capabilities into cohesive, maintainable software.

This role has high impact technical leadership responsibilities. As one of our most senior engineers, you'll work across our telephony and platform stack, collaborating closely with our Platform & Data pod and serving as a technical mentor to our broader engineering organization (~10 people total) in software engineering best practices. You'll help establish architectural patterns that ensure our systems are modular, testable, and adaptable to changing requirements.

Within your pod, you'll focus on designing and implementing elegant backend services using Kotlin, crafting thoughtful data models for Firestore, and ensuring our containerized services operate reliably in Google Cloud Platform environments. You'll work with telephony providers like Twilio and conversational AI platforms like Dialogflow to create seamless communication experiences, while also guiding the implementation of proper monitoring and observability solutions. Your architectural decisions and engineering leadership will directly influence the entire engineering team's productivity and the quality of our customer-facing systems.

Why You Belong Here & How You Will Grow:

At Slang Engineering, we cultivate a space where everyone can dream big, own their impact, and innovate boldly – all while having fun and supporting each other along the way. We put an emphasis on collaboration, and we are split into small teams with different responsibilities and ownership. We engage in hack-a-thons to allow people to find time to bring real innovation, unchained from our day-to-day work and priorities. We are a fully remote company, but also have a New York city office space, for those who are local or in town and want a hub.

• Success means delivering high-quality software solutions that balance technical excellence, business requirements, and operational reliability while contributing to our engineering team's growth.
• Design and develop robust, maintainable backend systems using Kotlin that power our telephony services while ensuring code quality, testability, and adherence to domain-driven design principles
• Architect data models and access patterns for Firestore that optimize for both performance and maintainability while supporting evolving business requirements
• Implement clean, well-structured integrations with telephony providers like Twilio and conversational AI platforms like Dialogflow, ensuring fault tolerance and graceful error handling
• Drive technical excellence by mentoring team members on software engineering best practices and fostering a culture of code quality and continuous improvement
• Establish and maintain SOC2 compliance practices in our codebase, ensuring proper security controls, audit trails, and documentation to meet regulatory requirements
• Create and enforce dependency management strategies that balance staying current with managing security vulnerabilities while minimizing disruption to development workflows
• Implement comprehensive observability solutions that provide actionable insights into application performance and behavior, enabling data-driven improvements
• Design and develop containerized services that follow best practices for cloud-native applications, emphasizing scalability, resilience, and operational efficiency
• Reduce technical debt through thoughtful refactoring, architectural improvements, and clear documentation that enhances the overall maintainability of our systems
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to transform business requirements into elegant technical solutions that deliver value to our customers
• Stay current with developments in software engineering, JVM ecosystem, and cloud-native technologies, evaluating and adopting practices that enhance our engineering capabilities

• Technical Excellence
• Design and implement software architectures that balance maintainability, performance, and business requirements
• Achieve measurable improvements in code quality, test coverage, and technical debt reduction
• Establish patterns for secure, compliant software that meets SOC 2 requirements while remaining flexible and extensible

• System Reliability
• Reduce production incidents through thoughtful error handling, graceful degradation, and defensive coding practices
• Implement comprehensive observability that enables rapid diagnosis and resolution of issues
• Create resilient integrations with external services (Twilio, Dialogflow) that handle failures elegantly

• Team Development
• Mentor engineers on JVM ecosystem best practices, domain-driven design, and clean code principles
• Create practical training programs and documentation that elevate the team's software engineering capabilities
• Demonstrate the team's increased velocity and confidence in delivering high-quality software through knowledge sharing and pairing

• Technical Innovation
• Evaluate and introduce appropriate new technologies that align with our stack (GCP, Kotlin, Firestore)
• Implement effective dependency management practices that keep our stack current and secure
• Balance innovation with stability to ensure consistent delivery of business value

• 10+ years in software engineering, with significant experience in JVM-based applications and systems design
• BS/MS in Computer Science or related field
• Deep expertise in domain-driven design patterns, object-oriented design, and software architecture principles
• Strong experience developing backend services with Kotlin (or extensive JVM experience with Java, Scala, or Clojure)
• Experience using functional programming languages or paradigms in production environments
• Experience designing data models and implementing solutions with Firestore or similar NoSQL databases
• Proficiency in developing cloud-native applications for Google Cloud Platform (or another cloud environment)
• Experience with containerized applications using Docker and orchestration with Kubernetes
• Knowledge of dependency management, versioning strategies, and maintaining secure software supply chains
• Experience implementing observability patterns and writing maintainable, debuggable code
• Demonstrated success in designing and implementing systems that meet compliance requirements (e.g., SOC 2)
• Ability and willingness to participate in our on-call rotation
• Experience integrating with external services and APIs
• Ability to think strategically about technical architecture, code quality, and reliability/complexity/cost trade-offs
• Excellent communication skills, especially translating complex technical concepts to cross-functional stakeholders
• A desire to mentor engineers and elevate the team's software engineering practices
• Pro-activity and ability to not only solve complex technical problems yourself but also guide others through collaborative solutions
• 
  

How Work Affects My Life:

Working as a Staff Software Engineer at Slang Engineering offers a unique opportunity to shape innovative communication systems that transform how restaurants connect with their customers. Through designing elegant software architectures, implementing domain-driven solutions, and crafting maintainable code, the successful candidate will gain deep satisfaction from seeing their technical decisions materialize into seamless customer experiences. This role provides the fulfillment of witnessing tangible improvements in system functionality, code quality, and business outcomes—all directly resulting from the software solutions they've designed and implemented.

The focus on code quality, testability, and system design principles will have long-lasting positive impacts on both the product and the engineering team. By establishing strong architectural patterns, implementing thoughtful error handling, and creating comprehensive observability, the Staff Software Engineer helps create an environment where technical problems become more predictable and manageable. This directly contributes to a sustainable pace of development and healthier work-life balance for the entire engineering organization.

Participation in the on-call rotation provides valuable real-world feedback on design decisions, creating a virtuous cycle where operational experience directly informs better software design. This connection between building and supporting systems leads to deeper technical understanding and more resilient solutions over time.

Slang Engineering's emphasis on innovation, collaboration, and personal growth aligns with the values of a talented and ambitious software engineer. The company's commitment to providing employees with opportunities for professional development and the freedom to explore new technologies demonstrates its recognition of the value of its employees and their contributions. By joining Slang Engineering, the successful candidate will find an environment where their expertise in building elegant, robust software systems is valued, and where they can make a meaningful impact on both the technology and the quality of the customer experience.

Our Vision

Calling a business shouldn’t feel like a robot-hostage situation, where you’re forced to listen to horrible music and can't reach a human, while enduring a soulless voice uttering "I'm sorry I didn't quite get that" on repeat for eternity. (shudder) That’s why we started Slang.ai. We use the latest AI and audio wizardry to make transacting via voice so enjoyable it’s more human than human. By 2030, we will save businesses and consumers 1 billion minutes of precious time while transforming voice channels into the preferred mode of communication (it's faster and easier than text).

We have backgrounds building product at companies like Spotify, Buzzfeed, the New York Times, and OpenTable —shipping experiences that have reached hundreds of millions of users. Now, we’re using our backgrounds to start a new culture, one that puts product and human-centered design above all else while fostering constant learning and growth. Sound like something you’d like to be part of? Get on board.

Our Values 

Overachiever Fever. We’re overachievers (we don’t know any other way)

Learner Fervor. We take every opportunity to learn (especially when it’s hard) 

Humility Ability. We approach each other with curiosity and openness (know-it-alls not welcome!)

SMB MVP. We’re an expert member of our customers’ teams (we earn their trust)