Sr Backend Engineer at Slang AI
New York, NY
$185,000–$215,000from the description
Jul 26, 2026
New York, NY
Jul 28, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
A senior backend engineer role at a conversational AI startup building voice automation for restaurants. The primary focus (~90% of time) is designing and shipping scalable backend services in Kotlin — including GraphQL APIs, telephony integrations (Twilio/Telnyx), and real-time voice AI pipelines — deployed on Google Cloud Platform. The role also involves occasional React/TypeScript frontend work, mentoring junior engineers, and contributing to architectural direction within a pod.
Senior level · 5+ years · 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
Roughly 14,900 people nationally plausibly meet what this posting asks for (software developers). range 9,000–22,400
Applicant volume Moderate — A normal amount of company. The rare requirements below are what will separate a shortlisted application from the rest.
Rare in this occupation — lead with these, and say what you built with them.
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). This posting is about at that midpoint.
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 (7)
The posting is titled 'Senior Software Engineer' but the compensation section describes it as benchmarked to 'mid-level engineering market rates' — an unusual internal inconsistency. The scope, mentoring expectations, and end-to-end ownership clearly support a Senior classification.
Kotlin is listed as the working language but the posting explicitly states prior Kotlin experience is not required — any strong object-oriented language satisfies the gate. The alternatives field reflects the languages the JD names as acceptable.
GCP is listed as the primary cloud platform; AWS and Azure appear only as acceptable alternatives in the required qualifications, so they are captured as alternatives rather than separate skills.
Twilio and Telnyx are listed together as the telephony providers actually used; they are captured as a single skill with alternatives since the JD treats them interchangeably.
Firestore, Cloud Run, Cloud Functions, Pub/Sub, Terraform, LLMs (speech-to-text/LLM orchestration/text-to-speech), and observability tooling all appear under Preferred Qualifications or in the scope/stack narrative and are marked accordingly.
Slack and GitHub appear only in the collaboration tools narrative, not in any requirements section.
No specific degree is required; the posting makes no mention of a degree at all.
Read the full posting
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