Backend Engineer, Voice Systems

Curio is built from the ground up with privacy and security at its core — a place where toys and interactive experiences come to life through safe, imaginative play. Our mission is to increase imagination through products that enrich, educate, and entertain kids. We are a small, high-performing team, and every hire has a major impact on the product.

We are looking for a backend engineer with strong experience in voice systems to help build the infrastructure powering Curio’s conversational experiences.

In this role, you will design, build, and scale backend systems that enable real-time voice interaction between children and Curio characters. You will own core services, APIs, and infrastructure, ensuring low-latency, reliability, and high performance. You will collaborate closely with AI, product, and hardware teams to deliver seamless voice experiences, contribute to system architecture and technical decisions, and rapidly iterate on new features.

This role requires strong ownership, experience with real-time or streaming systems, and the ability to build scalable, production-grade infrastructure in a fast-moving environment.

• Location: Woodside, CA
• Work Model: Onsite 4 days per week at HQ for Bay Area–based employees. For candidates based outside the Bay Area, onsite 1-2 weeks per month.
• Company: Curio
• Employment Type: Full-time
• Visa Sponsorship: Available

• Build and maintain backend systems supporting real-time voice interactions
• Develop infrastructure for speech-to-text, text-to-speech, and conversational AI pipelines
• Optimize latency and reliability for live voice experiences
• Design scalable backend services for Curio’s AI-powered products
• Work closely with AI and product teams to integrate conversational features
• Improve performance and reliability of the voice platform

• 3–8+ years of backend software engineering experience
• Strong experience building scalable, production-grade backend systems
• Strong experience with TypeScript in production environments
• Experience designing APIs and service-oriented architectures
• Strong understanding of databases and data modeling (PostgreSQL or similar)
• Experience writing efficient SQL queries and working with complex datasets
• Experience with cloud infrastructure and distributed systems
• Strong debugging, performance optimization, and systems design skills
• Experience shipping production systems used by real users
• Experience with strongly typed languages and solid understanding of type systems

• Experience with functional programming languages (e.g. F#, Scala, Haskell)
• Experience working with real-time systems (e.g. voice systems, audio processing)
• Experience building or working with AI-enabled systems
• Interest or experience using AI tools and agent-driven workflows to improve developer productivity
• Ability to contribute to frontend or mobile applications (React Native, React, Next.js, Expo, or similar)
• Comfort working across the stack to support end-to-end feature development
• Experience with reactive messaging queue system (such as NATS or kafka)
• Experience with low-latency streaming systems
• Experience integrating AI models into production applications

Salary: 

• Mid-level experience: $180k-$230k + Equity
• Senior-level experience: $230k - $300k + Equity

Benefits: 

• Health and dental insurance 
• In-office meals and snacks 
• Phone stipend
• Commuter stipend 

Time Off: Unlimited PTO

Compensation will be determined based on experience.

• Senior engineers with strong technical judgment
• People who can design and own critical infrastructure systems
• Experience building high-performance backend platforms
• Curiosity and excitement about voice interfaces and AI experiences

• Small team with high ownership and impact
• Opportunity to shape the future of AI-powered interactive toys
• Work at the intersection of AI, voice technology, and storytelling