Software Engineer, Backend (New Grad)
Otter.ai
About the Role
We're building the next generation of AI-native product experiences where conversations turn directly into outcomes. As a Software Engineer on our engineering teams, you’ll join one of our engineering teams and help build the systems that power meeting transcription, summarization, and collaboration for users around the world. You’ll work on real production systems from day one. Depending on your team, that could mean working on user-facing features or the services and infrastructure behind them. You’ll partner closely with engineers, product, design, and AI teams to design, ship, and iterate.
Key Responsibilities
- Build and ship production software. Design, implement, test, and deploy features and services that serve real users at scale.
- Own problems end-to-end. Take work from idea through design, implementation, rollout, and monitoring.
- Design for real-world constraints. Make deliberate tradeoffs across latency, cost, reliability, and quality.
- Build clean, scalable systems. Develop backend services, APIs, and async workflows that are maintainable and built to evolve.
- Improve quality continuously. Use metrics, logging, user feedback, and experimentation to find problems and make systems better.
- Move quickly with modern tools. Use AI-assisted development and modern tooling to prototype and ship fast while keeping a high engineering bar.
Requirements & Tech Stack
- Writes clean, maintainable code in a modern language (Python, Go, Java, C++, or similar) and has a solid grasp of computer science fundamentals such as data structures, algorithms, and systems basics.
- Has some exposure to backend or systems concepts such as APIs, databases, distributed systems, or cloud infrastructure.
- Thinks about outcomes, not just implementation, and cares whether what they build is reliable and useful.
- Takes ownership of problems end-to-end and collaborates well across product, design, and AI disciplines.
- Is comfortable operating in ambiguous, fast-moving environments and can iterate quickly on both product and technical direction.
- Salary Range: $136,000 to $164,500 USD per year.
Qualifications
- Has a bachelor's or master's degree in Computer Science or a related field.
- Is a recent grad or has up to 1 year of experience building software, with a growing sense of how backend decisions impact user experience.
Nice to have
- Any experience (including coursework, projects, or internships) building backend, infrastructure, or product-facing systems.
- Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP), containers, or CI/CD.
- Any experience with LLM-powered features or ML systems (prompting, evaluation, RAG, speech recognition, etc.).