Senior Platform Engineer

Senior Platform Engineer

We are seeking a talented senior software engineer with strong experience in backend services and cloud infrastructure platforms to advance our core mission: using the world's most advanced technology for emotion understanding to build empathy and goal-alignment into AI. Join us in New York City, or wherever you are located, and contribute to our endeavor to ensure that AI is guided by human values, the most pivotal challenge (and opportunity) of the 21st century.

Hume AI is a Series B startup dedicated to building artificial intelligence that is directly optimized for human well-being. We're gearing up to launch the next generation of Octave and EVI, our foundational speech-language models for voice generation and powering real-time empathic AI assistants for any application. Our models understand and generate subtle tones of voice, word emphasis, and more and the reactions of users. They are rated higher than models by OpenAI and others on empathy, expressiveness, naturalness, and speed, instantly speak with 100K+ unique voices and styles, stream language, emotion, and reasoning – all at once, and are fast enough to feel truly conversational (<300ms latency). Our goal is to enable a future in which technology draws on an understanding of human emotional expression to better serve human goals. As part of our mission, we also conduct groundbreaking scientific research, publish in leading scientific journals like Nature, and support a non-profit, The Hume Initiative, that has released the first concrete ethical guidelines for empathic AI ( You can learn more about us on our website and read about us in WIRED, Forbes, and Venturebeat.

About the Role

As a Senior Platform Engineer, you will work directly with our team of research scientists, machine learning engineers, and designers to improve the services that allow us to deliver expression measurement, expression generation, and empathic foundation models in a number of groundbreaking applications. You will support cutting-edge research by contributing to the design, construction, and maintenance of a modern and efficient cloud AI infrastructure and the applications that run on it. You will be expected to operate with a high degree of autonomy, make sound architectural decisions, and take ownership of systems from design through production.

Responsibilities

• Write clear and concise code to extend functionality on our platform and backend services.
• Architect and implement systems that enable new features and improvements of our API.
• Own the design and evolution of our cloud infrastructure, from deployment pipelines to production services.
• Communicate, collaborate, and grow alongside our engineering team.
• Champion well-tested, highly observable software with a focus on reliability and latency.

Requirements

• 5+ years of experience in developing backend services.
• Expertise working with compute and storage on a cloud platform (e.g. GCP, AWS).
• Experience in Kotlin/Spring, Typescript/Express, Python/FastAPI, or Rust.
• Deep understanding of modern deployment strategies utilizing cloud technologies (e.g. blue/green, canary deployments, etc).
• Familiarity with service deployment tooling (especially Kubernetes, Terraform, Argo, Docker).
• History building and maintaining highly available SaaS products which ensure scalability, performance, and observability.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills.

Bonus

• Experience with machine learning concepts.
• Experience with relational databases (PostgreSQL, BigQuery, etc.).

Annual Salary $180,000 - $230,000 USD