Backend Engineer - Palo Alto

Title: Backend Engineer - Palo Alto Location: San Francisco, CA About Plaud Inc. Plaud is building the real-world AI interface for professionals to amplify intelligence, elevate productivity and performance, loved by over 2,500,000 users worldwide since 2023. With a mission to amplify human intelligence, Plaud captures, structures, and compounds the intelligence generated in conversations — so humans can think better, decide faster, and execute with clarity. Plaud Inc. is a Delaware-incorporated, San Francisco-based company pushing the boundary of human–AI intelligence through a hardware–software combination. With full ISO 27001, ISO 27701, SOC 2, GDPR, EN18031, and HIPAA compliances, Plaud is committed to the highest standards of data security and privacy protection. To learn more about Plaud, please visit and follow along on Instagram Facebook LinkedIn and YouTube Why You Should Join Us Plaud is building the next generation intelligence infrastructure and interfaces to capture, extract, and utilize intelligence from what people say, hear, see, and think. - Plaud is a bootstrapped, skyrocketing, profitable company with a $300M revenue run rate achieved in just three years. - Define the next-gen paradigm for human-AI interaction. - Gain exposure to cutting-edge AI for Pro tools and play a direct role in our global expansion. - Work with passionate teammates who value innovation, collaboration, and customer success. - Grow your career in a culture that champions continuous learning and fast career development. - Market-competitive compensation, global exposure, and a vibrant, creativity-fueled work atmosphere. What You Will Do - Design, build, and ship the batch transcription and streaming ASR API services on Plaud's developer platform — owning the full stack from inference API design and model service integration through authentication, rate limiting, versioning, and developer documentation. - Deploy and operate the STT services across all 4 global regions; establish on-call rotation, monitoring, alerting, and SLO governance from launch; lead incident response and post-mortems. - Architect for high-concurrency, low-latency MaaS-style workloads — streaming/real-time protocols (WebSocket/gRPC), async job pipelines for batch transcription, autoscaling, and cost/latency optimization — benchmarking against SOTA inference API providers (e.g., Deepgram, AssemblyAI, Google STT). - Serve as the primary technical point of contact for B2B customers on API capabilities; scope, commit to, and deliver new feature requests on defined timelines. - Collaborate directly with the algorithm team on ASR model integration and with product on the developer platform roadmap; use AI tooling to accelerate development, documentation, and observability workflows. Minimum Qualifications - 5+ years of backend engineering experience with strong Go (Golang) proficiency; shipped and operated production services in Go. - Hands-on production experience building and operating AI/ML-serving backend services — inference API design, model service integration, on-call and incident response — not just internal tooling or prototypes. - Solid architecture experience with high-concurrency, low-latency platform services: multi-region deployment, streaming/real-time protocols (WebSocket and/or gRPC), async/queue-based job pipelines, and autoscaling. - Experience designing and shipping public-facing APIs or SDKs — authentication, rate limiting, versioning, and developer-facing documentation. - Professional English proficiency (written and spoken) for developer documentation and direct B2B customer engagement. What We Offer - Founding Team: Opportunity to join the founding team of this new initiative, with meaningful ownership and impact on a fast-growing startup. - Competitive Compensation: $159K-$219K base salary+performance bonus+Equity. - Comprehensive Benefits: Top-tier healthcare for employees and dependents, including dental and vision, and a generous employer subsidy. - Retirement Planning: 401(k) plan for full time employees with company matching. - Paid Time Off: Unlimited PTO, plus 13 paid holidays. - New Parent Leave: 12 weeks of paid time off to spend time with your new family, regardless of gender. - Hybrid Office: Minimum of 3x in office per week. - Gear: New hires are equipped with their choice of new top-of-the-line laptops and workstation setups. - Perks: Best office equipment. Annual offsites. Free office drinks and snacks. Plaud is and will continue to be an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability, genetic information, or other applicable legally protected characteristics.