Staff Engineer

About the Role

We're looking for a Staff Engineer to help architect, scale, and evolve our core product platform as we grow into new markets and customer segments.

You'll be a technical leader and systems thinker working across the stack in an environment built on quick iteration, where engineers operate with a high degree of ownership and independence.

This role is best suited to someone who can take an ambiguous customer problem, scope a sharp solution, and ship it end to end — and whose work raises the bar for the whole team.

What You'll Do

• Own features from ambiguous problem statement through design, implementation, deployment, and customer feedback — partnering with product and fellow engineers along the way, across the stack as needed.
• Exercise strong scoping judgment: deliver high-quality features quickly while making deliberate, well-understood trade-offs.
• Set the technical quality bar for the team through your own work.
• Improve engineering workflows and tooling to make delivery faster for everyone.
• Make pragmatic technology choices that fit the problem at hand.
• Multiply the team through design feedback, code review, and mentorship without adding process for its own sake.
• Partner directly with product and customers to shape what we build next.

What We're Looking For

• 8+ years of software engineering experience across multiple layers of the stack, with a strong record of technical ownership and shipped impact.
• A track record of taking products or major features from zero to customers — ideally in startups or environments with quick iteration cycles.
• Excellent judgment about scope: you know when good enough is right, when quality is non-negotiable, and how to tell the difference.
• Strong systems thinking spanning backend services, APIs, data persistence, and the interfaces that connect them.
• Comfort with ambiguity and independence — you don't need a spec, a ticket, or permission to do the right thing.
• Clear, direct communication with engineers, product leaders, and customers alike.

Nice to Have

• Experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS preferred), infrastructure-as-code, and DevOps practices.
• Experience productionizing ML models or building on ML-powered APIs, especially audio/voice.
• Experience in developer-facing API products, gaming, or trust & safety.

At Modulate, we prioritize people and sustainability—because doing great work requires feeling supported and safe. Some of our key benefits include:

• Competitive salary + equity- Full health, dental, and vision coverage
• Flexible PTO, with a strong culture of taking it
• Weekly team lunches with dietary accommodations
• Hybrid work: core in-office days with flexible remote options
• Regular leadership and industry learning sessions
• Support for career development and continued learning
• Up to 8 weeks work-from-anywhere policy
• A deeply inclusive, human-centered culture

Modulate is a frontier audio AI company building audio-native models that power the next generation of voice AI, enabling machines to understand the nuances in human conversation beyond the words being spoken. Its Velma platform is powered by Modulate’s Ensemble Listening Model (ELM) architecture, bringing together more than 100 specialized models to understand signals including emotion, tone, intent, synthetic speech and conversational behavior and create a powerful layer of audio intelligence for voice applications. Modulate’s technology has analyzed more than 600 million hours of audio and is used across AI agents, fraud and deepfake detection, customer experience, trust and safety, and other emerging voice applications.

For more information, visit modulate.ai.