Software Engineer

A Tin Can has exactly one job. A kid picks it up, and the person they want to talk to is on the other end - clear, and right away, every time. When that doesn’t happen we haven’t shipped a bug, we’ve broken the promise a family bought us for. There is no feature we could ship this year that matters more than getting this right., * Make change management real for customer-visible behavior, so a migration that changes what a family hears is announced rather than discovered

• Own the pipelines that carry an application or call-path change into production: reviewed, tested, and reversible
• Own the staging tier as a real gate, where a change proves itself against production-like traffic before a kid’s phone sees it
• Load-test the activation chain ahead of our holiday peak, so the busiest morning of the year is one we’ve already rehearsed
• Build the product-outcome layer of our observability - the funnels and SLOs showing whether a call, voicemail, or activation actually succeeded - alongside the infrastructure metrics our SRE owns
• Drive incidents to real root cause across the stack, from SIP signaling and media to Lambda services and Postgres
• Own the incident-review practice: every class of failure gets an owner, a runbook, and a test that would catch it next time
• Partner with our reliability PM to turn diagnosis into a backlog engineering can actually execute against, * We’re building tech that protects childhood: We’re on a quest to give kids a more analog childhood - one with real conversations, real connection, and way less screen time. No doomscrolling, data mining, or dopamine traps - just a simpler, better way for kids to stay in touch. This is a rare opportunity to build something that truly matters.
• You’ll own the promise the whole company is judged on: Reliability is our top priority this year, and this is the engineering role that owns it. You’ll set the technical direction for how a Tin Can stays dependable as we scale.
• Small, high-trust team: Every company says “team,” but at Tin Can it means something different. We’re a small, mission-driven group that genuinely has each other’s backs - professionally and personally. You’ll be joining a tight-knit crew where your ideas and instincts matter from day one.
• Room to explore, not just execute: You’ll have the space to explore new ideas, challenge assumptions, and build systems that reflect our values of trust, simplicity, and care.

• 5+ years building and operating production backend or distributed systems where downtime is something real people notice
• Real depth in AWS and infrastructure as code (we use Terraform), and a bias toward reproducibility
• You’ve owned reliability as a discipline, not a fire drill - SLOs, meaningful alerting, load testing, and incident review that changes what gets built next
• Comfortable in real-time and telephony systems, or genuinely eager to get there; SIP, RTP, and media behavior are the substrate here
• Fluency using AI as a multiplier across diagnosis, analysis, and testing
• Hands-on and scrappy; you’d rather run the load test or read the SIP trace yourself than wait on someone else
• A clear communicator who writes things down
• A collaborative, low-ego approach - everyone here sweeps the floor
• Bonus: production FreeSWITCH, Kamailio, or carrier SIP trunking; load-testing a system through a seasonal peak; Postgres at scale; operating a consumer hardware fleet; or observability tooling like Grafana

Tin Can is building a safer, simpler way for kids to connect - without smartphones. We’re creating screen-free, delightful devices and services that let families call the people who matter most, free from the noise of today’s digital world.

We’re building a bold, authentic, nostalgic, and kinda quirky brand that resonates with folks who want something simpler & better for their kids than the tech-infused lives we’re currently living (and who have a sense of humor about it). As we gear up to scale to thousands of families, we’re ready to bring on an engineer to help make it happen.