Platform Engineer
Phonic · San Francisco
About Phonic
Phonic is an audio research lab focused on powering the most realistic, human-like voice AI conversations. We’ve rethought the entire stack in pursuit of this goal, from models to product, to create voice agents that feel like they truly understand you, respond emotionally, and perform agentic tasks with frontier intelligence.
Our customers build voice-native AI products in industries like customer support, healthcare, logistics, and recruiting. We’ve grown ~20x since the start of this year, and we’ve raised over $30M from tier-1 VCs, including First Round Capital, Lux Capital, and Felicis.
About the Team
Phonic has an extremely talent-dense and close-knit team of top-tier AI researchers, international olympiad medalists, and former founders. We work with high trust and keep raising the bar on how we deliver world-class research and product experiences. Everyone takes ownership of what they do and isn’t afraid to dive headfirst into new problems. We’re fully in person in our SF office.
About The Role
As a Platform Engineer at Phonic, you'll build the foundation that lets our engineering team move fast without breaking things. Real-time voice AI at our scale is unforgiving — latency is visible, reliability is everything, and our systems need to perform flawlessly across hundreds of thousands of mission-critical calls every day. You'll own the infrastructure, tooling, and deployment systems that make that possible, freeing our backend and research teams to focus on pushing the frontier.
What You'll Do
Design and maintain the core infrastructure that powers Phonic's real-time voice AI platform - cloud infrastructure, deployment pipelines, and observability systems
Build internal tooling and abstractions that improve engineering velocity across the team
Own reliability and performance at scale - define SLOs, instrument monitoring, and lead incident response when things go wrong
Partner closely with backend engineers and researchers to translate cutting-edge AI capabilities into production-ready systems
Drive improvements to how we build, test, and ship software - reducing friction across the entire development lifecycle
What You'll Bring
Strong experience with cloud infrastructure - GCP, AWS, or Azure - and containerized deployments (Docker, Kubernetes)
Proficiency with infrastructure-as-code tooling (Terraform or equivalent)
A track record of improving reliability and developer experience in high-throughput, latency-sensitive systems
Ownership mindset: you don't wait to be asked and you see problems through to the end
Comfort dropping below the abstraction layer - able to debug at the level of bits and bytes when it's called for
Strong system design instincts - clean architecture, high availability, and as few moving parts as possible
A track record of driving performance at scale - pushing requests-per-second toward best-in-class efficiency
Nice To Have
Experience with real-time or streaming systems (WebSockets, WebRTC, or similar)
Familiarity with ML/AI infrastructure — model serving, GPU workloads, or inference optimization
Strong proficiency in TypeScript and Python
You are a former founder
Benefits
💸 Top-tier compensation: in order to get the best talent, we provide salary and equity that recognize your skillset
🥗 Meals: free breakfast, lunch, and dinner provided in the office
🩺 Healthcare: Comprehensive health, dental, and vision
🤝 We have regular off-sites and team celebrations
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