Senior Software Engineer, AI Data

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At AssemblyAI, we’re building at the forefront of Speech AI, creating powerful models for speech‑to‑text and speech understanding available through a straightforward API. With more than 200,000 developers building on our API and over 5,000 paying customers, AssemblyAI is helping unlock and support the next generation of powerful, meaningful products built with AI.

We’re seeking an exceptional Senior Software Engineer to join our AI Data team. This role is focused on building robust, scalable systems that power our AI data platform. You’ll work on high‑impact projects that directly influence our ability to train, evaluate, and deploy models at scale, with a strong emphasis on software engineering excellence, system reliability, and code quality.

As a Senior Engineer, you’ll drive technical execution within your team, taking ownership of significant features and components. You should be passionate about writing clean, maintainable code, implementing comprehensive testing strategies, and continuously improving engineering practices. This role requires close collaboration with researchers, platform engineers, and other stakeholders. You’ll need to balance technical excellence with pragmatic delivery in a fast‑paced startup environment.

What You’ll Do

• Design scalable, future‑proof data platforms optimized for AI research workloads
• Build efficient self‑serve data processing pipelines leveraging GCP’s advanced services
• Implement cost‑effective storage and monitoring solutions for ML at scale
• Create flexible training resource management with intelligent queuing
• Optimize resource allocation for maximum training efficiency
• Participate in on‑call rotation to ensure system reliability

Advance Technical Excellence

• Lead adoption of cutting‑edge ML tools and frameworks, continuously evaluating and integrating best‑in‑class solutions
• Streamline existing workflows while introducing new tooling that further reduces complexity
• Enhance our tooling and documentation to accelerate team velocity and maintain our competitive edge
• Implement guardrails for cost, quality, and performance
• Identify and eliminate technical bottlenecks in the data processing and training pipelines

What You’ll Need

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience
• Strong proficiency in Python and SQL with demonstrated ability to write production‑quality code
• Solid understanding of software engineering fundamentals:

• Data structures and algorithms
• System design and architectural patterns
• Testing strategies (unit, integration, end‑to‑end)
• Code review practices and technical collaboration

• RESTful APIs and distributed systems concepts
• Containerization (Docker) and basic cloud infrastructure

Preferred

• Experience with GCP services (BigQuery, GCS, Cloud Run, GKE)
• Familiarity with distributed processing frameworks (Apache Beam, PySpark)
• Experience with workflow orchestration tools (Airflow, Prefect, Dagster)
• Understanding of ML/AI infrastructure and data pipelines
• Experience with monitoring and observability tools (Datadog)
• Experience working with researchers directly
• Background in data engineering roles

What We’re Looking For

• Excellent at software fundamentals – You write code that others want to emulate
• Quality‑focused – You care deeply about testing, documentation, and maintainability
• Customer‑aware – You understand how your work impacts research experience and business outcomes
• Collaborative – You work well with diverse stakeholders and help others succeed
• Growth‑minded – You’re curious, eager to learn, and want to expand into platform and infrastructure engineering
• Pragmatic – You balance perfection with delivery and understand trade‑offs in a fast‑paced environment
• Team‑oriented – You improve not just the code, but the team’s overall effectiveness
• Reliable – You build systems that customers depend on for their critical operations

Pay Transparency

AssemblyAI strives to recruit and retain exceptional talent from diverse backgrounds while ensuring pay equity across our team. Our salary ranges are set to be competitive for our size, stage, and industry, and reflect just one component of the full compensation, benefits, and rewards we offer. Salary determinations consider a variety of factors, including relevant experience, technical depth, skills demonstrated during the interview process, and maintaining internal equity with peers on the team.

The expected base compensation for this role is listed above. Our total compensation package includes competitive equity grants, 100% employer‑paid benefits, and the flexibility of being fully remote.

Working at AssemblyAI

We are a small but mighty group of startup veterans and experienced AI researchers with over 20 years of expertise in Machine Learning, Speech Recognition, and NLP. As a fully remote team, we’re looking for people to join our team who are ambitious, curious, and lead with integrity. We’re committed to creating a space where our employees can bring their full selves to work and have equal opportunity to succeed.