Staff Software Engineer

Who We Are: WellSaid Labs

We’re creating Voice for everyone.

At WellSaid Labs, we enable creatives around the globe by putting high-tech, human parity technology into their hands, giving them the ability to add voice-over to any project and iterate with ease. Creative teams use WellSaid Lab’s Voice Studio to create compelling employee training, design unique digital experiences, and narrate audiobooks. We believe deeply in AI for Good, and that technology should be empowering, engaging, and fair to all people.

Who You Are: A Staff / Sr. Staff Engineer with an affinity for mentorship and teamwork

You are an experienced full-stack engineer and software architect with an eye for building scalable and user-pleasing web applications. You are comfortable working in an agile environment and collaborating with and technically leading other engineers, designers, and product managers. You are eager to learn new skills and technologies, and share your knowledge with more junior engineers. You have a strong sense of ownership and pride in your work, and strive to deliver high-quality designs and code that meet the needs of the users and the business - all while having fun in the process.

Ideally, you have extensive experience developing both front-end and back-end SaaS solutions using modern technologies and frameworks.

How You’ll Contribute:

We have developed a breakthrough AI algorithm that creates synthetic, realistic speech from text. You will provide technical leadership and will be an integral part of the development of the creative studio powered by this algorithm, enabling creatives to make lifelike voiceovers for videos, audiobooks, and training programs.

In this role, you’ll be responsible for the development of features and maintenance of components of our Text-to-Speech application, Studio. This includes building a scalable system architecture vision, working with the team to iteratively make progress towards the future state, writing and reviewing technical and design specifications, owning delivery of parts of larger engineering initiatives, mentoring team members, and working both collaboratively as well as independently in a mature web codebase.

The projects you'll undertake are geared toward bringing improvements and new functionality to the WellSaid Labs Studio. Working directly with our product team, you'll collaboratively provide technical and architectural leadership to build features that have high impact and visibility in our customers' daily interactions with Studio as well as help WellSaid Labs improve and create a world-class software solution for creative teams.

In this role, you’ll:

• Build architecture designs: Outlining a future vision towards an ever-evolving robust, scalable, performant, secure, compliant, and maintainable system architecture and data model that meets future business use cases
• Validate architecture decisions: Creating prototypes and proof of concepts to validate architectural decisions and explore new technologies or approaches.
• Optimize system performance: Identify performance bottlenecks and optimize system performance through architectural improvements, code optimizations, and infrastructure enhancements.
• Technically lead the team: Guide the Studio engineering team to make technical decisions that are inline with the future architectural vision as well as work collaboratively to build future generations of our editor with a scalable avatar marketplace, streamlined customer onboarding experience, and an improved user experience for larger teams to collaborate together to create human-parity audio
• Ensure Security and Compliance: Implement security best practices and ensure compliance with industry standards and regulations related to data security and privacy.
• Write Documentation: Create and maintain comprehensive documentation for architectural designs, development processes, and best practices.

Also, you’ll be challenged to:

• Lead Technology Selection: Evaluate and select appropriate technologies, frameworks, and tools for front-end and back-end development, ensuring alignment with business goals and technical requirements.
• Mature processes: Find opportunities to mature our engineering processes
• Code Review and Technical Guidance: Conduct code reviews to ensure adherence to architectural principles and best practices. Provide technical guidance and mentorship to engineering teams.
• Collaboration: Collaborate closely with cross-functional teams, including product management, UI/UX design, quality assurance, and DevOps, to drive the successful delivery of software solutions. In addition, lead technical collaboration across teams and represent work and decisions from the Studio team.
• Research and Innovation: Stay updated on emerging technologies, trends, and best practices in software architecture and contribute to continuous innovation within the organization.
• Interview software engineer candidates: Help interview and recruit more talented engineers to WellSaid Labs!
  
  

What We’re Looking For

To thrive in this role, you have a combination of technical expertise, leadership abilities, and a passion for driving innovation. You have strong front-end and back-end technical skills in addition to communication and collaboration skills that enable you to effectively lead a technical team to make decisions and iteratively deliver functionality to solve customer problems. You ideally have experience with React (alternatively, Angular, Vue, or similar), Apollo GraphQL, Typescript (alternatively, Java, C#, or similar), and HTML/CSS. You have an understanding of and point of view on software design principles. You also have some combination of the following:

• 10+ years of experience in software development, with a focus on full-stack development and architecture design, preferably in a SaaS environment.
• Experience building and shipping end-to-end features to a sizable user base, with consideration for security, performance, scalability, reliability, and repeatability.
• Proficiency in a wide range of front-end and back-end technologies, such as JavaScript/TypeScript, React, Node.js, Python, SQL/NoSQL databases, RESTful APIs, microservices architecture, containerization, and cloud platforms (e.g., AWS, Azure, GCP).
• Strong expertise in designing scalable, distributed systems and understanding of design patterns, architectural styles, and software engineering principles.
• Proven experience in leading architecture design initiatives, mentoring engineering teams, and driving technical excellence across an organization.
• Excellent analytical and problem-solving skills, with the ability to quickly grasp complex technical concepts and make informed decisions.
• Strong verbal and written communication skills, with the ability to effectively communicate technical concepts to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Collaborative mindset with a willingness to work closely with cross-functional teams and contribute to a positive and inclusive work environment.
• Ability to thrive in a fast-paced and dynamic environment, where priorities may change rapidly, and flexibility is essential.
• Ability to represent the engineering team in planning and project scoping.

To join our team you must also:

• be a U.S. Citizen or Permanent Resident
• pass a pre-employment background check
  
  

What We Offer

WSL is proud to support an inclusive work environment that emphasizes each team member’s personal and professional growth. Our team is fully distributed throughout the U.S., and we support flexible schedules - work where and when you work best. You’ll have teammates just a Slack message or video call away if you ever need help solving an exciting challenge, or even if you just have a funny story to tell.

As a startup, we strive to be externally competitive with companies at a similar size and stage, and internally fair in our pay practices. The hiring salary range for this role is base pay of $180,000 - $200,000 annually. This represents the target offer range given the scope and experience expectations for this role.

In hiring, we are generally open to a range of experiences and levels, and recognize that as a candidate you may be less experienced or more senior than this job description as posted. If that's the case, an updated salary range will be shared with you if you move forward in our hiring process.

Other perks and benefits:

• Competitive salary and stock options
• Full medical, dental, and vision insurance
• Matching 401(k) plan
• Generous vacation policy/paid time off
• Parental leave
• Learning & development stipend
• Home office stipend
  
  

What to Expect From Us

We strongly encourage you to apply! If we feel your skills, experience, and values match, we’ll reach out about meeting with the team.

During the interview stage, you can expect:

• An introductory interview with the hiring manager (50 minutes)
• A technical assessment through ByteBoard (110 minutes)
• An Interview loop with 3-4 interviews (1 hour each) with the team members you will be potentially working with

All interviews will be remote via Google Meets; we are happy to make accommodations you might need to feel comfortable and set up for success in our process.

WellSaid Labs is honored to be an equal opportunity workplace. We realize that by bringing together teams rich in diverse thoughts and experiences, our people, company, and customers are free to flourish. We are committed to providing equal employment opportunities regardless of race, color, national origin, religion, creed, genetic information, sex (including pregnancy, sexual orientation or gender identity), age, marital status, disability, military or veteran status; or any other protected classifications or characteristics under applicable local laws.