Staff Backend Engineer

About David AI

David AI is the first audio data research company. We bring an R&D approach to data–developing datasets with the same rigor AI labs bring to models. Our mission is to bring AI into the real world, and we believe audio is the gateway. Speech is versatile, accessible, and human—it fits naturally into everyday life. As audio AI advances and new use cases emerge, high-quality training data is the bottleneck. This is where David AI comes in.

David AI was founded in 2024 by a team of former Scale AI engineers and operators. In less than a year, we’ve brought on most FAANG companies and AI labs as customers. We recently raised a $50M Series B from Meritech, NVIDIA, Jack Altman (Alt Capital), Amplify Partners, First Round Capital and other Tier 1 investors.

Our team is sharp, humble, ambitious, and tight-knit. We’re looking for the best research, engineering, product, and operations minds to join us on our mission to push the frontier of audio AI.

About our Engineering team

At David AI, our engineers build the pipelines, platforms, and models that transform raw audio into high-signal data for leading AI labs and enterprises. We're a tight-knit team of product engineers, infrastructure specialists, and machine learning experts focused on building the world’s first audio data research company.

We move fast, own our work end-to-end, and ship to production daily. Our team designs real-time pipelines handling terabytes of speech data and deploys cutting-edge generative audio models.

About this role

As a Staff Backend Engineer at David AI, you’ll lead our Product Engineering team in building cutting-edge products that help our customers make sense of the audio data they’ll use to train their models, working closely with researchers to consistently iterate on how to best collect our data.

In this role, you will

• Lead full-stack feature development and iterate rapidly to deliver innovations to our users daily.

• Build scalable systems processing terabytes of audio data and deriving actionable insights.

• Deploy and evaluate LLM- and DSP-based solutions to enhance customer data understanding.

• Drive research iteration and interface deployment for data collection with researchers and Operations.

• Mentor engineers and establish technical standards as the team scales.

• Stay current with cutting-edge frameworks across software engineering, data engineering, ML, and signal processing.

Your background looks like

• 6+ years of product-focused full-stack engineering experience.

• Strong web development fundamentals with experience building rapid prototypes and scalable user solutions.

• Proven track record delivering engineering solutions that provide customer value.

• Experience in fast-paced environments with detail-oriented execution.

• Focus on building intuitive, highly polished production-grade user experiences.

• Track record of success in technical leadership or engineering management.

• AI/ML or audio experience is not required but willingness to learn is essential.

Bonus points if you have

• Educational or professional experience with digital signal processing and a deep understanding of speech.

• Experience building and deploying ML models in a production environment.

• Led (managed or tech-led) engineering teams in high-growth environments.

Some technologies we work with

• Next.js, TypeScript, TailwindCSS, Node.js, tRPC, PostgreSQL, AWS, Trigger.dev, WebRTC, FFmpeg.