Member of Technical Staff
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 Member of Technical Staff at Phonic, you'll work across the full range of what it takes to build voice AI from low-level platform and infrastructure engineering to applied research. This is a generalist role: you'll move fluidly between problems as the company needs them solved, taking end-to-end ownership from design through production.
We don't divide MTS by title or seniority. You'll be trusted with real scope from day one, and the shape of your role will grow and shift as Phonic does.
What You'll Do
Own problems end-to-end - from architecture and design through shipping and iteration in production.
Work anywhere across the stack as needed: platform and infrastructure engineering, backend services and APIs, product surfaces, or applied research.
Partner directly with research and ML to translate frontier voice AI capabilities into reliable, production-grade systems.
Help set technical standards and practices for the team while we're still small enough for it to matter.
Work wherever your strengths and interests point — infra one week, a research prototype or a customer-facing feature the next; tell us where your interests lie and we’ll help place you there.
What You'll Bring
Bachelor's degree (or higher) in Computer Science from a top university.
Proven track record: you've built and shipped production systems you're genuinely proud of.
Genuine interest and demonstrated ability to work across the full range from platform engineering to research — not boxed into one layer of the stack.
Strong engineering fundamentals: clean, testable, maintainable code, even when moving fast.
Full-stack fluency: experience with or strong interest in frontend, backend, infrastructure, and the seams between them, or demonstrably fast at picking up new stacks.
Ownership mindset: you take problems from ambiguous to shipped without needing a fully-scoped spec.
Execution speed: you ship, learn, and iterate quickly rather than overplanning.
Autonomy: you thrive with real scope and minimal oversight, and you're comfortable being opinionated.
AI-native: you use modern AI tooling (coding agents, LLM APIs) as a natural extension of how you build.
Nice to Have
Experience with real-time or streaming systems (WebSockets, WebRTC, audio/media pipelines).
Experience at an early-stage startup where you helped set technical standards.
Familiarity with voice, telephony, or conversational AI products.
You're a former founder or technical lead.
Benefits
Top-tier compensation: competitive salary and equity to match the caliber of talent we hire.
Meals: free breakfast, lunch, and dinner in the office.
Healthcare: comprehensive health, dental, and vision coverage.
Regular off-sites and team celebrations.