Backend Engineer Remote, with an optional 1 day every 2 weeks in London / UK

Are you interested in designing world-leading sign language technology and networking with businesses, the third sector, and individual professionals? Are you ready to join a small and experienced team working towards a mission to make spoken and written languages accessible to Deaf people?

About Signapse

Signapse is a fast-paced startup with the goal of making the world a more inclusive place for the Deaf community. As a tech for good, we're using AI to create sign language translations in the video, transportation, and website spaces. Signapse is expanding at pace within these spaces, providing a perfect opportunity to grow its technical team. By joining as a backend engineer on our live streaming team, you'll be working on SignStream—our product that takes audio, text or video input and outputs AI-generated sign language translations as MP4, HLS streams and more. You'll be instrumental in reducing latency, implementing new streaming protocols, and building the foundations of our real-time delivery infrastructure.

Personal Requirements

• 3-5 years of backend engineering experience
• Strong proficiency in Go
• Experience with video streaming protocols (HLS, DASH, or similar)
• Understanding of low-latency systems and performance optimisation
• Experience working with video processing pipelines
• Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines and deployment practices
• Strong communication skills, whether written, verbal or signed
• Comfortable working in an early-stage environment
• Collaborating closely with frontend, QA, and DevOps engineers

Example Responsibilities

• Design, implement and build live streaming infrastructure for SignStream by:
• Improving end-to-end latency across the translation pipeline
• Implementing new streaming protocols including WebRTC, SRT and low-latency HLS
• Building and optimising video processing pipelines
• Contributing to architectural decisions for real-time delivery systems
• Collaborating with DevOps engineers on infrastructure and deployment
• Ensuring services are monitored, observable and production-ready
• Contributing to discussions on technical feasibility and brainstorming solutions

Knowledge, Skills and Experience

• Experience with WebRTC or SRT
• Experience with low-latency HLS (LL-HLS)
• Familiarity with FFmpeg
• Rust experience
• Experience with real-time audio/video synchronisation
• Understanding of cloud infrastructure (AWS)
• Familiarity with Terraform

24 days’ holiday plus bank holidays and company pension scheme. Competitive compensation and high-value equity packages. Opportunity to work on cutting-edge technologies and be involved at the early stages of a high-growth business.

Hours

This is a full-time position, with normal virtual office hours of 9am to 6pm, although flexibility is offered to suit reasonable personal circumstances. What matters most to us is strong collaboration, meeting agreed milestones, and the delivery of high-quality work.

Please note you must have the right to work and live full-time in the UK when you apply for this position.

Equality and Diversity

Signapse is committed to eliminating discrimination and encouraging diversity in our team. Our aim is that our team will be truly representative of all sections of society and each employee feels respected and able to give their best. We’ve created a culture of encouragement and support to enable our employees to focus on what they truly want to achieve for successful career development. Our work-life policies and flexible working practices make our employees feel more in control of their personal and working lives. Any applicants who are native sign language users are guaranteed an interview.

As part of our recruitment process, the company collects and processes personal information, or personal data, relating to job applicants. We are committed to protecting the privacy and security of your personal information and to meeting our data protection obligations under the General Data Protection Regulation (“GDPR”) and the Data Protection Act 2018.