Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Close is a company that manages millions of call recordings, sales emails, and SMS every month. They are seeking a Senior Backend Engineer to enhance their communications infrastructure, focusing on real-time AI challenges and distributed systems.
Responsibilities
- Overhaul how Close syncs email and calendars
- Take voice agents further into the call
- Solve inbound
- Build native scheduling
- Design human orchestration of an agentic workforce
- Push connect rates and answer rates
- Move our streaming and event substrate forward
Skills
- A seasoned engineer. Python is our backbone, but perhaps you've worked across Go, Rust, or TypeScript. You pick the right tool for the workload rather than retreating to what you know
- Deeply experienced with email and calendar platforms. IMAP, sync protocols, calendar APIs, and the thousand edge cases of oddly configured enterprise mail servers. This is the experience that makes someone successful on this team fastest
- Fluent in real-time and async distributed systems. WebRTC, WebSockets, queues, streaming. You've debugged a production incident where latency budgets didn't hold
- Opinionated about AI in real-time workflows. You've built or used live transcription, voice agents, or in-the-loop AI features. You have a view on what's ready for production versus what's still a demo
- At home in the gnarly bits. Telephony providers, codecs, retries, eventual consistency. You're drawn to the systems where edge cases actually matter
- Working with AI in your day-to-day. You use AI tools in your own workflow to ship faster, write tighter code, and reason about unfamiliar parts of the codebase
- A builder first. You'd rather get a sloppy v1 in front of fifty customers than spend three weeks on abstractions. You ship
- Deep Twilio or similar telephony experience is a big plus (not a requirement — but a game changer off the bat)
Company Overview