Software Engineer

About the role

At Bolna, we’re building tools that change how businesses leverage voice AI.

We’re looking for a Software Engineer to build reliable, scalable systems that power millions of production conversations across languages, industries, and telephony environments.

This is a high-impact, high-ownership role where you’ll work on core platform problems across distributed systems, real-time communication, developer infrastructure, and customer-facing products.

Our team includes IIT alumni with experience at Bain, Atlassian, Uber, Zomato, and LinkedIn, and is backed by leading investors.

RESPONSIBILITIES

1. Build systems that operate at scale: Design and build backend services that support high-volume, real-time voice AI conversations with strong reliability, performance, and fault tolerance.

2. Own features end to end: Take problems from product requirements and technical design through implementation, testing, deployment, monitoring, and iteration.

3. Improve platform reliability: Build systems that are observable, resilient, and easy to debug. Identify bottlenecks, reduce failure rates, and improve system availability.

4. Work on real-time infrastructure: Solve problems across telephony, streaming audio, webhooks, queues, scheduling, concurrency, and low-latency communication.

5. Build for developers and customers: Improve APIs, SDKs, integrations, dashboards, and internal tools that make the Bolna platform easier to use and operate.

6. Raise the engineering bar: Contribute to technical design reviews, code quality, testing standards, documentation, incident response, and engineering best practices.

REQUIRED SKILLS

1. Strong engineering fundamentals: Solid understanding of data structures, algorithms, databases, networking, operating systems, and distributed systems.

2. Backend development experience: 2+ years of experience building and operating production backend systems using Python, Go, Java, Node.js, or a similar language.

3. Production ownership: Experience shipping software to production and owning its reliability, monitoring, and performance after release.

4. Database experience: Strong understanding of relational databases, data modelling, indexing, transactions, and query performance.

5. API design: Experience designing and building reliable REST, event-driven, or real-time APIs.

6. Problem-solving mindset: Ability to break down ambiguous problems, make sound technical trade-offs, and deliver pragmatic solutions.

7. Bias toward shipping: You value speed, but not at the cost of quality. You test, deploy, monitor, and improve what you build.

PREFERRED SKILLS

1. Voice AI orchestration: Experience building real-time conversational systems that orchestrate ASR, LLM, and TTS models over streaming or WebSocket-based pipelines.

2. Speech and AI provider integrations: Experience integrating external ASR, LLM, and TTS providers and designing abstractions that make models and vendors interchangeable.

3. Real-time media pipelines: Familiarity with streaming audio, buffering, interruption handling, turn-taking, retries, timeouts, and fault-tolerant conversation flows.

4. Bolna ecosystem familiarity: Prior experience using, contributing to, or building on the open-source bolna-ai/bolna voice-agent orchestration framework is a strong advantage.

WHY JOIN

Backed to build big: Bolna is backed by Y Combinator and leading investors, and we are on a mission to build a generational voice AI company from India.

Rocketship trajectory: We are profitable, growing rapidly, and handling more than 4 million minutes of real conversations every week. Your work will reach production quickly and operate at meaningful scale.

Hard engineering problems: You’ll work on distributed systems, real-time infrastructure, telephony, reliability, latency, and platform scale—not isolated features.

Real ownership: You’ll own meaningful parts of the product and platform, from technical design through production performance.

Strong customer feedback loop: You’ll see how your work affects real businesses and use production feedback to improve the platform.

Learn beyond code: You’ll work closely with product, ML, infrastructure, and customer-facing teams, and gain visibility into how technical decisions influence product and business outcomes.

BENEFITS

Competitive compensation, meaningful ESOP ownership, health insurance.