Founding Backend Engineer

As a Founding 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 joining the founding engineering team, 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-ready infrastructure: Build the platform layer that AI services run on — reliable API contracts, queue-based async pipelines, and graceful failure handling for non-deterministic model outputs. You'll work closely with our AI engineer and need to understand LLM behavior well enough to design resilient systems around it.

• 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/staff level 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

• Comfort building reliable systems around non-deterministic AI services — you understand that LLM calls are slow, expensive, and can fail in unexpected ways, and you design accordingly

• Enough fluency with ML infrastructure to be a strong partner to an AI engineer — you don't need to write evals, but you need to understand why they matter and how they affect your systems

Salary of $200k to $300k.

This position will receive meaningful stock options with considerable upside potential. We provide standard benefits such as health insurance, dental insurance, etc.

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.

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.