API Engineering Lead

Subquadratic

API Engineering Lead developing and evolving customer-facing and backend APIs for AI infrastructure company. Leading architecture, implementation, and performance improvements in real-time and batch speech APIs.

Posted 4/12/2026full-timeRemote • California • 🇺🇸 United StatesSeniorWebsite

Tech Stack

Tools & technologies

AWSCloudDistributed SystemsGoGRPCKubernetesRayRust

About the role

Key responsibilities & impact

Own end-to-end design, architecture, and evolution of Subquadratic’s customer facing and backend APIs
Architect for Scale & Speed: Design and evolve the global control plane for Subquadratic’s real-time (WebSocket/gRPC) and batch APIs
Productionize ML at the Edge: Build the high-throughput inference layer that wraps our speech models
Optimize for millisecond-level cold starts and efficient GPU utilization
Reliability & Observability: implement distributed tracing (OpenTelemetry) and define strict SLOs for streaming stability (e.g., jitter, connection drop rates)
Security by Design: Lead the implementation of enterprise-grade security (API keys, OAuth2, rate limiting) and compliance controls (SOC2, data retention) for sensitive audio data
Define API standards, versioning, authentication, usage metering
Partner with Research, Product, and Infra to deliver new capabilities
Mentor engineers and set best practices for API engineering

Requirements

What you’ll need

5–8 years backend/systems engineering experience
Strong experience building and running production APIs
Deep Proficiency in Go or Rust
Experience with streaming systems (websockets, gRPC, real-time audio/video)
ML Infrastructure Experience: Familiarity with model serving (Triton, TorchServe, Ray) or orchestrating GPU workloads on Kubernetes/AWS
Deep understanding of distributed systems, performance tuning, async I/O
Cloud Native Fluency: Hands-on experience with AWS (EKS/ECS, Lambda, ElastiCache)
Bonus Background in speech, audio, DSP, or ML inference pipelines
Experience building SDKs, developer tooling, or API billing/usage systems
Early-stage startup experience

Benefits

Comp & perks

Competitive base salary
Equity participation
Comprehensive health, dental, and vision coverage
Flexible paid time off

ATS Keywords

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Applicant Tracking System Keywords

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Hard Skills & Tools

backend engineeringAPI designGoRuststreaming systemsmachine learning infrastructuredistributed systemsperformance tuningcloud nativeSDK development

Soft Skills

mentoringcollaborationbest practices

Certifications

SOC2 compliance