Senior Backend Engineer

Senior Backend Engineer YOUR ROLE As a founding Senior Backend Engineer at Overtone, you will build and own the core systems behind a new kind of dating experience—one centered on real-time voice, AI-driven insight, and trust. You’ll be the second engineering hire, with significant responsibility for architecture, reliability, and technical direction as we move from 0→1 and beyond. This is a hands-on, high-ownership role. You’ll work closely with product, design, and leadership to experiment quickly, ship thoughtfully, and scale systems that operate in a deeply personal and high-trust domain. What You’ll Do - Core backend systems: Design and build the foundational backend for a consumer voice-first product, with a focus on clarity, reliability, and long-term flexibility. - Real-time voice infrastructure: Build and operate systems that support real-time voice interactions, streaming architectures, and low-latency user experiences (e.g., WebRTC or similar technologies). - Fault-tolerant systems: Design systems that degrade gracefully, recover cleanly, and remain reliable under partial failure—especially in live, user-facing experiences. - 0→1 product experimentation: Move fast alongside product and design as we explore new interaction models and AI-powered features, iterating frequently and learning from real usage. - AI & human-in-the-loop systems: Support systems that integrate LLMs and ML models with human oversight, evaluation workflows, and clear failure handling. - Security & privacy by design: Build with user data protection, privacy, and trust as first-class concerns, not afterthoughts. - System observability & scaling: Implement monitoring, logging, and alerting; identify bottlenecks early; and evolve the system to scale as usage grows. - Technical ownership: Help set engineering standards, make architectural tradeoffs, and establish a culture of pragmatic, high-quality engineering. Who You Are - Senior experience as a backend or systems engineer on consumer-facing products - A strong track record of building from 0→1 and then helping systems scale - Experience with real-time or streaming systems (voice, video, messaging, or similar) - Comfort designing fault-tolerant, production-grade systems under real-world constraints - Strong judgment around security, privacy, and reliability, especially in high-trust products - Experience with ML infrastructure, recommender systems, or ranking systems - Familiarity with LLM-powered products, including evaluation, experimentation, and feedback loops - Exposure to MLOps or model lifecycle management in production systems COMPENSATION & BENEFITS Salary of $175k to $225k. This position will receive meaningful stock options with considerable upside potential. We provide standard benefits such as health insurance, dental insurance, etc. OUR CORE QUALITIES We look for these qualities in everyone we hire at Overtone. Curiosity: You seek to understand before you decide. You ask thoughtful questions, test assumptions, and stay open to changing your mind as new information emerges. Craft: You care deeply about quality and coherence. You simplify complexity, exercise good judgment, and take pride in work that feels intentional, thoughtful, and well-made. Collaboration: You engage with others honestly and generatively. You challenge ideas with respect, listen deeply, and help synthesize perspectives into clearer, better outcomes. Care: You take responsibility for people and outcomes. You act with integrity, follow through on commitments, and protect trust—with users, teammates, and the work itself. ABOUT OVERTONE Overtone, led by the founder and former CEO of Hinge, is building a new kind of dating service – one that cuts through the noise and helps daters find someone who truly resonates. We’re building a team who are excited to work together in person in our NYC office.