Staff Software Engineer, Voices
Role details
Job location
Tech stack
Job description
You will work on the core systems powering Synthesia's script preview and voice generation experience , ensuring users can reliably generate high-quality voiceovers across a wide range of languages, providers, and use cases.
You will build and operate backend services that orchestrate multiple text-to-speech (TTS) providers , alongside Synthesia's in-house models, delivering a seamless and consistent experience to end users despite underlying system complexity.
You will be responsible for designing and evolving systems that handle provider reliability, request routing, and output consistency , ensuring users can generate and regenerate voice content with predictable, high-quality results.
You will contribute to user-facing product problems from a backend perspective , working closely with frontend engineers to ensure APIs and workflows integrate cleanly into the product experience.
You will own projects that span multiple systems and domains, such as:
- Building robustness layers (retries, throttling, failover) to handle unreliable third-party providers
- Designing persistence systems to ensure consistent voice outputs across generations
- Improving how voice data is stored, retrieved, and reused
You will also work on newer initiatives around voice discovery and recommendations , helping users find the best voices by building evaluation systems, improving recommendation logic, and adding observability to monitor quality.
You will evaluate your work through system performance and user experience metrics , using observability to debug and continuously improve reliability.
You will collaborate closely with product, frontend, and R&D teams, ensuring backend systems support both current product needs and future innovation., * 45min call with an Engineering Manager about your past projects
- 90min Live Coding interview, a collaboration exercise with our Engineer (not Leetcode style)
- 60min System Design, technical discussion usually about a real problem we had in production
- 45min call with leadership, focus on examples of collaboration, growth and going through details of your future team
You can find more details on what to expect and how to prepare HERE. The process does not need to take long - we can be done in seven working days.
Requirements
- You have several years of experience building and operating backend systems in production.
- You're a strong backend engineer (we use Python/FastAPI) with experience designing reliable, observable services , ideally working with third-party APIs or distributed systems.
- You have a product mindset and focus on solving user-facing problems, not just backend architecture.
- You're comfortable working close to the client , understanding how APIs are consumed and how backend decisions impact the end-user experience.
- You're willing to step outside your comfort zone - including jumping into frontend code when needed to debug and understand end-to-end flows.
- You work well in an iterative, experiment-driven environment , shipping quickly and improving based on data and feedback.
- Experience with observability tools (e.g. Datadog), workflow systems (e.g. Temporal), or evaluation/recommendation systems is a plus, but not required.
- Comfortable with touching the frontend in any language and/or framework