Senior Backend Engineer – Communications (USA Only - 100% Remote) at Close
$140,000–$210,000
Jul 15, 2026
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Jul 21, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
This role sits on the Communications team, responsible for the infrastructure handling email sync, calendar integration, real-time voice calls, and AI-powered voice agents. Day-to-day work spans rebuilding a decade-old email/calendar sync engine, extending live call and voice agent capabilities (including inbound call handling), and advancing the streaming and telephony plumbing the product depends on. It suits engineers with strong distributed-systems experience, particularly around email protocols, real-time communication, and production AI integrations.
Senior level · Remote · Full-time
“or” means any one of them counts — you don't need all of them.
We read this from the posting text with AI. Skim the description below before ruling yourself out.
How this req sits in the market our data
Most people in this occupation already list these. Still required — just not what gets you shortlisted.
What the occupation pays Median $138,970 (middle half $107,524–$175,762).
Estimated from BLS employment for this occupation and area, per-skill prevalence across our listing corpus, and published wage benchmarks — as of Jul 28, 2026. It is a model, not a headcount.
Why we read it this way (10)
The posting is explicitly open at multiple levels — Software Engineer, Senior, and Staff — with calibration happening during the process. 'Senior' is used as the seniority here as the default for an experienced hands-on role; the actual level will be determined per candidate.
the title states no level because the title carries no single level — the posting explicitly names three possible levels rather than committing to one.
Python is named as 'our backbone' with firm language ('Python is our backbone'); IMAP/sync protocols/calendar APIs are called out as the experience that 'makes someone successful on this team fastest' — both treated as hard gates.
WebRTC and WebSockets appear under the 'Fluent in real-time and async distributed systems' requirement block with firm descriptive language ('You've debugged a production incident…'), treating them as hard gates.
Twilio is explicitly flagged as 'a big plus (not a requirement)' — marked preferred accordingly.
Go, Rust, and TypeScript are listed as alternative languages to Python ('perhaps you've worked across Go, Rust, or TypeScript') and appear in a descriptive/context framing rather than a hard-gate section — marked preferred, with Rust and TypeScript as alternatives to Go.
Kafka, Redis, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, AssemblyAI, and ElevenLabs appear only in the 'Tech you'll touch' stack narrative at the bottom of the posting — not in any requirements block — and are therefore marked preferred.
No compensation range is stated anywhere in the posting.
No degree requirement is stated.
Caller marked this a fully-remote role — scored against the national candidate pool.
Read the full posting
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