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Aldea Inc

API Engineering Lead

Aldea Inc, San Francisco, California, United States, 94199

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Aldea is a multi-modal foundational AI company reimagining the scaling laws of intelligence. We believe today's architectures create unnecessary bottlenecks for the evolution of software. Our mission is to build the next generation of foundational models that power a more expressive, contextual, and intelligent human‑machine interface.

About the Role Aldea is looking for a

highly technical API Engineering Lead

to own and drive our API roadmap. You’ll lead architecture, implementation, and performance improvements across our real‑time and batch speech APIs. This role sits at the intersection of backend engineering, real‑time streaming, and ML productionization.

What You’ll Do

Own end‑to‑end design, architecture, and evolution of Aldea’s customer facing and backend APIs

Architect for Scale & Speed:

Design and evolve the global control plane for Aldea’s real‑time (WebSocket/gRPC) and batch APIs.

Productionize ML at the Edge:

Build the high‑throughput inference layer that wraps our speech models. Optimize for millisecond‑level cold starts and efficient GPU utilization.

Reliability & Observability:

implement distributed tracing (OpenTelemetry) and define strict SLOs for streaming stability (e.g., jitter, connection drop rates).

Security by Design:

Lead the implementation of enterprise‑grade security (API keys, OAuth2, rate limiting) and compliance controls (SOC2, data retention) for sensitive audio data.

Partner with Research, Product, and Infra to deliver new capabilities

Mentor engineers and set best practices for API engineering

What You Bring

5–8 years backend/systems engineering experience

Strong experience building and running production APIs

Deep Proficiency in Go or Rust.

(Python is great for modeling, but our hot path needs systems‑level performance).

Experience with streaming systems (websockets, gRPC, real‑time audio/video)

ML Infrastructure Experience:

Familiarity with model serving (Triton, TorchServe, Ray) or orchestrating GPU workloads on Kubernetes/AWS.

Deep understanding of distributed systems, performance tuning, async I/O

Cloud Native Fluency:

Hands‑on experience with AWS (EKS/ECS, Lambda, ElastiCache).

Bonus

Background in speech, audio, DSP, or ML inference pipelines

Experience building SDKs, developer tooling, or API billing/usage systems

Early‑stage startup experience

Success Looks Like

APIs that are fast, reliable, and developer‑friendly

Seamless integration of new models and features

Strong engineering foundation that supports rapid iteration

300ms End‑to‑End Latency (P95) for voice‑to‑voice interactions.

A "One‑Line Integration" experience that developers rave about.

Equity participation

Comprehensive health, dental, and vision coverage

Flexible paid time off

Aldea is proud to be an equal‑opportunity employer. We are committed to building a diverse and inclusive culture that celebrates authenticity to win as one. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, marital status, disability, protected veteran status, citizenship or immigration status, or any other legally protected characteristics.

Aldea uses E‑Verify to confirm employment eligibility in compliance with federal law. For more information please visit: https://www.e‑verify.gov

Please note: We do not accept unsolicited resumes from recruiters or employment agencies and will not be responsible for any fees related to unsolicited resumes.

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