Software Engineer, Backend (New Grad)

Otter.ai is hiring a new-grad backend software engineer to build and improve the systems powering meeting transcription, summarization, and collaboration. The role involves developing production features and services, owning work end-to-end, and collaborating across engineering, product, design, and AI teams.

What you'll do:

• Build and ship production software. Design, implement, test, and deploy features and services that serve real users at scale
• Own problems end-to-end. Take work from idea through design, implementation, rollout, and monitoring
• Design for real-world constraints. Make deliberate tradeoffs across latency, cost, reliability, and quality
• Build clean, scalable systems. Develop backend services, APIs, and async workflows that are maintainable and built to evolve
• Improve quality continuously. Use metrics, logging, user feedback, and experimentation to find problems and make systems better
• Move quickly with modern tools. Use AI-assisted development and modern tooling to prototype and ship fast while keeping a high engineering bar

What they're looking for:

• Has a bachelor's or master's degree in Computer Science or a related field
• Is a recent grad or has up to 1 year of experience building software, with a growing sense of how backend decisions impact user experience
• Writes clean, maintainable code in a modern language (Python, Go, Java, C++, or similar) and has a solid grasp of computer science fundamentals such as data structures, algorithms, and systems basics
• Has some exposure to backend or systems concepts such as APIs, databases, distributed systems, or cloud infrastructure
• Thinks about outcomes, not just implementation, and cares whether what they build is reliable and useful
• Takes ownership of problems end-to-end and collaborates well across product, design, and AI disciplines
• Is comfortable operating in ambiguous, fast-moving environments and can iterate quickly on both product and technical direction
• Any experience (including coursework, projects, or internships) building backend, infrastructure, or product-facing systems
• Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP), containers, or CI/CD
• Any experience with LLM-powered features or ML systems (prompting, evaluation, RAG, speech recognition, etc.)

Benefits:

• Hybrid work