Job description

We are looking for a senior backend developer to lead the speech platform engineering team at ELSA. The speech platform hosts all the servers responsible for the speech recognition and AI features powering the ELSA mobile app and pronunciation API.
In this position you and your team will be working alongside some of Europe’s brightest scientists on state-of-the-art AI and speech recognition technology for language assessment. You and your team will be responsible for bringing new algorithms to production and making sure the software works efficiently at scale.

Your responsibilities will include:

• Lead a small team of 2-5 engineers responsible for the development and maintenance of the speech platform that powers ELSA’s AI algorithms and the ELSA API.
• Hands-on contributions to the software being developed within the research group.
• Mentor and review the works of the engineers in your team.
• Advocate and maintain good coding practices across the whole research group
• Lead refactoring and automated testing initiatives to ensure robustness and uptime
• Optimize efficiency of all software running ML/AI algorithms, allowing ELSA to serve its technology at scale
• Work closely with other service teams defining and implementing internal APIs to support Elsa applications

Your background:

• Bachelor degree in Computer Science, interest in ML/AI is not required but desirable
• 5+ years of proven industry experience
• Experience leading software developers
• Experience setting team goals and tracking performance
• Experience planning software development projects, splitting a big project into tasks and tracking completion using scrum methodology
• Strong experience with Linux software development
• Strong experience with containerization with Docker
• An eye for performance implications of code
• Strong programming expertise in one or more of Python3, Go, Ruby, Java, C++

Nice-to-have skills:

• Knowledge of how to deploy and work with cloud services (AWS, GCP) and Kubernetes infrastructure
• Some mobile (iOS/Android/Dart) and web development skills for prototyping
• Experience with Linux administration (Ubuntu)
• Some work experience working with customer-facing technology
• Experience with microservice architecture

What we offer

• Flexible working location (remote within European time zones is OK)
• Competitive salary and stock options according to seniority
• Private health insurance (if located in Portugal)
• Subsidized meal allowance (if located in Portugal)Flexible working hours
• Ample room to grow professionally
• Experience the true startup spirit of a fast-growing and well funded Silicon Valley startup
• Opportunity to work on a mission that can transform the lives of 1.5 Billion language learners around the World
• Work visa sponsorship for Portugal

About us

ELSA Corp. is a San Francisco AI-based startup with engineering offices in Portugal, India and Vietnam. Our vision is to enable everyone to speak foreign languages with full confidence, reaching better life and career opportunities. Our flagship product, ELSA speak, is a personal mobile coach who improves our users' English pronunciation and intonation using phoneme and suprasegmental analysis of the user's speech signal. Our backend servers implement state-of-the-art speech recognition technology to pinpoint errors and give accurate and consistent feedback to our users on how to improve.

Application:
Send your CV to [email protected] and we will get back to you.