AssemblyAI

The best way to build Voice AI apps

Senior Software Engineer, AI Data

£117K - £185K GBP•London, United Kingdom / Remote Job type Full-time Role Engineering, Full stack Experience 6+ years Visa US citizenship/visa not required Apply to AssemblyAI and hundreds of other fast-growing YC startups with a singleprofile. Apply to role 7;

About the role

About AssemblyAI

AssemblyAI builds the best-in-class Speech AI models powering the next generation of voice applications. Our models serve 600M+ inference calls monthly, process 1M+ hours of audio daily, and power 2 billion+ end-user experiencesfrom voice agents and meeting assistants to contact centers and medical scribes. Companies like Zoom, Granola, Fireflies, Cluely, and Calabrio rely on AssemblyAI to ship production-ready voice AI. We're at an inflection point in Speech AI. We released Universal-Streaming in mid-2025, and it has quickly earned its place as the model offering the best accuracy-latency-cost tradeoff on the market. Our research team drives these advances and ships with relentless velocity. Since releasing Universal-Streaming, we've already launched keyterms prompting feature and multilingual supportwith more significant improvements on the roadmap. We've raised $115M+ from Accel, Insight Partners, Y Combinator's AI Fund, Patrick and John Collison, Nat Friedman, and Daniel Gross. We're a remote team building one of the next great AI companiesand we're looking for people who will shape its future.

About the Role

We're seeking an exceptional Senior Software Engineer to join our AI Data team. This role is focused on building robust, scalable systems that power our AI data platform. You9ll work on high-impact projects that directly influence our ability to train and evaluate models at scale, with a strong emphasis on software engineering excellence, system reliability, and code quality. As a Senior Engineer, you'll drive technical execution within your team, taking ownership of significant features and components. You should be passionate about writing clean, maintainable code, implementing comprehensive testing strategies, and continuously improving engineering practices. This role requires close collaboration with researchers, platform engineers, and other stakeholders. You'll need to balance technical excellence with pragmatic delivery in a fast-paced startup environment.

What You9ll Do

Architect Next-Gen AI Data Infrastructure

• Design scalable, future-proof data platforms optimized for AI research workloads
• Build efficient self-serve data processing pipelines leveraging GCP's advanced services
• Implement cost-effective storage and monitoring solutions for ML at scale
• Create flexible training resource management with intelligent queuing
• Optimize resource allocation for maximum training efficiency
• Participate in on-call rotation to ensure system reliability

Advance Technical Excellence

• Lead adoption of cutting-edge ML tools and frameworks, continuously evaluating and integrating best-in-class solutions
• Streamline existing workflows while introducing new tooling that further reduces complexity
• Enhance our tooling and documentation to accelerate team velocity and maintain our competitive edge
• Implement guardrails for cost, quality, and performance
• Identify and eliminate technical bottlenecks in the data processing and training pipelines

What You9ll Need

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience
• Strong proficiency in Python and SQL with demonstrated ability to write production-quality code
• Solid understanding of software engineering fundamentals:
• Data structures and algorithms
• System design and architectural patterns
• Testing strategies (unit, integration, end-to-end)
• Code review practices and technical collaboration
• Experience with:
• RESTful APIs and distributed systems concepts
• Containerization (Docker) and basic cloud infrastructure
• Track record of delivering high-quality software in a team environment
• Ability to thrive in a startup environment with changing priorities and rapid iteration

Preferred

• Experience with GCP services (BigQuery, GCS, Cloud Run, GKE)
• Familiarity with distributed processing frameworks (Apache Beam, PySpark)
• Experience with workflow orchestration tools (Airflow, Prefect, Dagster)
• Understanding of ML/AI infrastructure and data pipelines
• Experience with monitoring and observability tools (Datadog)
• Experience working with researchers directly
• Background in data engineering roles

What We're Looking For

This role requires someone who is:

• Excellent at software fundamentals - You write code that others want to emulate
• Quality-focused - You care deeply about testing,documentation,and maintainability
• Customer-aware - You understand how your work impacts research experienceand business outcomes
• Collaborative - You work well with diverse stakeholdersand help others succeed
• Growth-minded - You're curious,eager to learn,and want to expand into platformand infrastructure engineering
• Pragmatic - You balance perfection with deliveryand understand trade-offs in a fast paced environment
• Team-oriented - You improve not just the code but the team's overall effectiveness
• Reliable - You build systems that customers depend on for their critical operations

We're looking for the best person for this role - someone who can hit the ground running while growing with the team. The ideal candidate brings strong software engineering disciplineand is excited to apply those skills to the unique challenges of data engineering at scale to support our model development lifecycle. Pay Transparency: AssemblyAI strives to recruitand retain exceptional talent from diverse backgrounds while ensuring pay equity across our team. Our salary ranges are set to be competitive for our size, stage, nd industry, nd reflect just one component of the full compensation, benefits, nd rewards we offer. The salary determinations consider a variety of factors including relevant experience, technical depth, skills demonstrated during the interview process, nd maintaining internal equity with peers on the team. The range shared below represents a general expectation for the posted position.ut we are open to considering candidates who may fall above or below outlined experience level—in those cases we will communicate any adjustments. Base Salary Range (Location Adjusted):

• Germany / Ireland: €141267 – €184512  (approx $150k-$195k USD)
• United Kingdom: £117159 – £153024  (approx $140k-$180k USD)

We set ranges per country to ensure competitive fair & transparent compensation across regions.inal offers will vary based on interview performance experience skill level & maintaining internal equity.xpected base compensation listed above includes competitive equity grants & employer-paid benefits & flexibility of being fully remote. Working at AssemblyAI: We are a small but mighty group of startup veterans & experienced AI researchers with over 20 years expertise in Machine Learning Speech Recognition & NLP. s a fully remote team we’re looking for people who are ambitious curious & lead with integrity.arly days of AI & AssemblyAI’s journey & are looking for teammates who won’t just fit in but will help us define & build company culture. We’re committed to creating space where employees can bring their full selves & have equal opportunity no matter race gender identity or expression sexual orientation religion origin ability age veteran status if joining this mission speaks apply! Using AI Interview: If selected please review resource about how AssemblyAI approaches use of AI interview process. gdpr privacy notice: candidates from EU should review this applicant privacy notice before applying. Keep Exploring AssemblyAI: cYouTube! Learn more about speech recognition models: Speech-to-text | Speech Understanding | LLM Gateway | Try Playground Our $50M Series C fundraise