Staff Engineer - Telephony

About this job

Sarvam AI is creating India's sovereign AI platform across research, models, infrastructure, and applications to make AI work for India. They are hiring a Staff Engineer for Telephony to work on Samvaad, their enterprise conversational AI platform that powers millions of personalized voice calls daily. In this hands-on individual contributor role, you will take ambiguous problems and turn them into reliable production systems. A normal day involves designing data models, building APIs, managing workflow orchestration, ensuring high performance and low-latency reliability, handling integration testing, and working closely with the frontend team using Next.js. You will own the entire backend for agent, campaign, and user management, establishing high engineering standards through design documents and RFCs. You will operate within a multi-tenant SaaS environment, ensuring that voice agents and campaigns run smoothly at scale without any people management duties.

Responsibilities

• Own the end-to-end backend for agent, campaign, and user management using Python and FastAPI.
• Manage workflow orchestration for complex, long-running, stateful operations using Temporal.
• Drive performance and reliability for a multi-tenant SaaS platform operating at sub-second latency SLOs.
• Implement robust observability including logging, metrics, and tracing for fast production debugging.
• Build and maintain integration test infrastructure to ship updates without breaking customer systems.
• Collaborate closely with the Next.js frontend team to deliver a seamless user experience.
• Champion a design-first and documentation-first culture by writing RFCs before code.

Requirements

• 8 to 12 years of experience building production backend systems.
• Deep expertise in Python and FastAPI or Golang.
• Must-have experience in building telephony infrastructure, primarily SIP and VoIP.
• Track record of full-stack ownership with experience designing and operating production systems.
• Hands-on experience with workflow orchestration at scale, ideally using Temporal.
• Experience building and operating high-scale, multi-tenant, low-latency distributed systems.
• Strong fundamentals in PostgreSQL and Redis for schema design, query performance, and caching.

Good to have

• Experience building products on top of LLMs or AI/ML systems.
• Previous experience at an early or growth-stage startup comfortable with ambiguity and speed.

Who should apply

This role suits experienced backend engineers with strong telephony and SIP or VoIP infrastructure expertise who want to own high-scale systems end-to-end. Candidates should have 8 to 12 years of production experience, a background in building multi-tenant distributed systems, and a strong grasp of Python, FastAPI, PostgreSQL, and Redis. It is ideal for independent contributors who thrive in fast-paced startup environments and enjoy setting engineering standards through documentation and architecture design rather than managing people.

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