Founding Staff Engineer – Platform

**Company Description**

CallPad empowers businesses to never miss a call or message, enabling clients to effortlessly book appointments within conversations. The platform enhances customer communication and streamlines scheduling, directly integrating with calendars. CallPad strives to create seamless interaction experiences that save time and improve operational efficiency. • *Role Description**

This role comes with direct ownership of the platform. • *You will be accountable for:**

- Working alongside CTO + senior/staff engineers for platform architecture and technical direction - Assisting with reliability, latency, and uptime of live voice calls - Ensuring predictable AI system behavior in production - Optimizing infrastructure scalability and cost per call

You will operate as an integral part of the team, influencing architecture, standards, and long-term direction as the engineering team grows. • *What You'll Do**

- Own the end-to-end architecture of the real-time voice AI platform - Design and evolve low-latency, high-reliability systems for live phone calls - Build and scale the infrastructure backbone: - Kubernetes-based services - Autoscaling for inference-heavy workloads - Failover, resilience, and cost controls - Lead AI orchestration in production: - STT → LLM → tools → TTS pipelines - Dialogue state, retries, fallbacks, and guardrails - Define platform standards early: - Service boundaries and APIs - Observability (metrics, logs, tracing) - Incident response and operational readiness

- Make high-leverage architectural decisions with incomplete information - Act as a technical leader without people management - Partner closely with product and leadership on roadmap and strategy • *Qualifications**

- 5-8+ years of professional software engineering experience - Experience operating at Staff level or equivalent impact - Background in platform and infrastructure engineering is a plus - Experience running AI systems in production is a plus - Understanding of: - Distributed systems and async architectures - Real-time, streaming, or event-driven systems - Kubernetes, cloud infrastructure, CI/CD - Datastores (Postgres, Redis, queues, object storage) - Experience with some of: - LLM orchestration and inference pipelines - Latency, reliability, and cost tradeoffs - Debugging complex production failures - Comfortable owning ambiguous, high-stakes systems - Clear communicator with strong technical judgment - We work in Kotlin Springboot and Typescript with Vite/React frontend. Experience with this is a plus but not necessary. • *Strong Plus if You Have**

- Voice, telephony, WebRTC, SIP, or audio pipeline experience - Experience integrating with external business software (booking, POS, salon systems) - Experience reducing inference cost at scale - Familiarity with GDPR, ISO 27001, SOC 2 - Prior early-stage or founding engineer experience • *What We Offer**

- Base Salary: €90,000 – €111,000 gross / year - Equity: Meaningful founding equity (~0.5% – 1.0%, stage-dependent) - 30 days paid vacation - Flexible working hours - Hybrid or remote within Germany - English-speaking, international team - Fun, Fast Paced work environment with interesting, bleeding edge engineering concepts - Ability to learn many new ML/AI tools/practices on the job