Staff Software Engineer

Billions of critical conversations happen every day in retail, hospitality, food service, logistics, and beyond — with customers and employees. Historically, these insights disappear the moment they're spoken.

Arbor turns in-person conversations into executive-grade strategic intelligence. We're signing real enterprise contracts in industries that power the global economy. The opportunity is massive, the problems are unsolved, and we need product-obsessed builders to join on our journey.

Must-haves

• 5+ years shipping production software, including time as an early engineer at a seed/Series A startup, and at least 1 enterprise experience.

• Full-stack generalist who owns features end-to-end with sharp product judgment - knows what to build, what to cut, when to push back

• Ships predictably and communicates clearly; credible with an enterprise VP of Ops on a customer call and async with a remote CTO

• Production experience in at least one of voice/audio, LLM apps, or data/insights pipelines (Umi is all three)

• Fluent in Python/FastAPI + TypeScript/React; moves across frontend, backend, and infra in a single PR

• Has shipped against flaky third-party APIs under latency/reliability pressure (telephony, real-time audio, payments, etc.)

• Working knowledge of LLM app development: prompts, structured output, retrieval, evals, and non-deterministic systems that hold up in prod

• AWS or GCP with multi-tenant SaaS security instincts (data isolation, PII, SOC 2)

• Excited to be a foundational hire building AI for frontline enterprise

Nice-to-haves

• Staff/tech-lead IC ready to grow into eng lead within ~12 months

• Voice agent stack (LiveKit, Pipecat, Vapi, Retell, or custom on Twilio/Deepgram/ElevenLabs) + speech fundamentals (ASR, TTS, diarization, VAD)

• Production agentic LLM workflows: tool use, multi-step, eval-driven

• Data/analytics depth: warehouse modeling, DBT, owning an insights pipeline

• On-call comfort on a small team - has been the person paged

1. Huge market, weak competition: Billions of offline conversations happen daily. No one else is solving this for real enterprise.

2. Large enterprise customers: We're already working with multi-billion dollar manufacturers, retailers, and logistics companies.

3. Strong founding team: Backgrounds from Harvard, Princeton, Meta, Insight Partners, IBM. We know how to listen, build, sell, ship, scale— then iterate and accelerate.

4. Real upside: Already backed by the best with $6M+ from 645 Ventures, NextPlay Ventures (Jeff Weiner), Wisdom, and angels, but early enough for founding team members to see generational outcomes from equity.

5. Product that works: Customers see immediate ROI. Enterprise deals close fast.

Mostly importantly, join for the team. We're A+ players who live our values:

• Own the outcome: From first idea to customer impact, see it through. No hand-offs, no excuses.

• Real problems only: Find energy in work that actually matters, not in building features that sound cool but solve nothing.

• Intellectual honesty: Admit what isn't known, ask uncomfortable questions, and challenge assumptions without fear.

• Clarity through chaos: Thrive in 0-to-1, high-intensity environments. Move fast but think clearly, turn confusion into direction, ship quality under pressure.

• Empathy above all: Obsess over customer problems and think deeply about user needs before making any decision.