Senior Software Engineer, Otter.ai
Virality and Activation
$185-230k
Office located in Mountain View, CA
AI notetaker, transcription & insights
Be an early applicant
AI notetaker, transcription & insights
201-500 employees
Be an early applicant
$185-230k
Office located in Mountain View, CA
201-500 employees
Company mission
To create smarter tools that free people up to do their best work.
Role
Who you are
- Holds a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related field, or has equivalent practical experience
- Has 5+ years of backend software engineering experience, with a strong track record of shipping impactful, user-facing features at scale
- Has deep proficiency in Python, and has used them to build and maintain production systems at scale; experience with Go or another high-performance compiled language is a plus
- Has strong command of relational databases (MySQL or similar) and has designed schemas and query patterns for high-traffic production workloads
- Has production experience with NoSQL and high-performance data stores — such as DynamoDB, Cassandra, Redis, or Elasticsearch — and can reason clearly about consistency, latency, and scalability trade-offs across storage systems
- Has production experience with Kafka or similar distributed messaging systems, and understands their operational trade-offs
- Is experienced with AWS infrastructure (EC2, S3, DynamoDB, or similar) and comfortable reasoning about reliability and cost in a cloud environment
- Has hands-on experience with A/B experimentation — not just running tests, but designing them rigorously and drawing well-grounded conclusions from results
- Defines success in terms of user outcomes and business metrics, not task completion
- Operates effectively in ambiguous environments: can scope a loosely defined problem, build alignment around a solution, and drive it to closure
- Communicates technical decisions clearly to both engineering peers and non-technical stakeholders
What the job involves
- We're building the next generation of AI-native product experiences, where conversations turn directly into outcomes
- As a Senior Software Engineer on the Virality & Activation team, you'll work at the intersection of product, growth, and systems — owning the engineering of features that directly shape how users activate, retain, and spread the product
- You'll work across the full lifecycle of growth initiatives, from the design of scalable backend systems that power sharing and onboarding infrastructure to the experimentation layer that lets the team learn fast and iterate with confidence
- This role requires balancing deep systems thinking with product intuition, ensuring that what we build is not only technically sound, but measurably moving the metrics that matter
- You'll partner closely with product, design, and data to drive initiatives end-to-end — from framing the problem and defining success metrics, through launch and metric readout — and set the technical standard for how the team builds
- Own features end-to-end: from technical design through launch to metric readout, operating with a high degree of autonomy
- Design and build scalable backend systems that power growth loops — sharing flows, invite mechanics, notification pipelines, and onboarding infrastructure
- Lead the instrumentation strategy for new features, ensuring the team has the data it needs to measure impact and iterate with confidence
- Drive A/B experiments: define hypotheses, instrument correctly, analyze results, and translate findings into concrete product decisions
- Raise the team's technical bar through rigorous code reviews, design feedback, and proactive documentation
- Partner with product and data to define what success looks like before building starts — and hold the team accountable to it after launch
- Identify systemic gaps and advocate for improvements that increase the team's velocity and reliability over time
Our take
Otter specifically thought of business professionals who are running from one meeting to the next, while juggling multiple projects with various teams. The company's technology integrates with platforms like Zoom, providing a way to record meetings and convert speech to text in real-time. It then streamlines communications for smarter, more collaborative, and more productive meetings—the first use of conversational AI to turn meetings into an actionable workflow.
This allows people to benefit from captioning, as well as teams to have a written record of the conversation, which can be edited and shared. Its AI can also highlight and comment on important sections of a meeting transcript, and automatically tag action items. In addition to businesses, students and universities – including UCLA, Tulane, and Western Kentucky – use the tool to increase accessibility.
The platform is used in more than 230 countries and has transcribed over 100 million meetings. Otter is far from alone in the audio transcription market, estimated to be worth nearly $41.89 billion by 2030, with Google’s free transcription tool posing a potential threat, as well as competitors such as Rev.
Kirsty
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
27% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 5 rounds)
Feb 2021
$10m
CONVERTIBLE
Feb 2021
$40m
SERIES B
Total funding: $73m
Company benefits
- Compensation: With highly competitive salaries and equity option packages, everyone's an owner here.
- Hybrid Working: You can mix and match working from our Mountain View or San Francisco office, plus a couple days from home.
- Social Gatherings: Quarterly gatherings in the Bay Area for some team real fun and authentic connection.
- Health and Wellness: Comprehensive medical, dental, vision, life insurance, disability, and wellness benefits that start the first day you do.
- PTO: Start with a minimum of 15 days of paid time off, plus up to 18 weeks for maternity leave and 8 weeks for paternity leave.
- 401(k): Plans to help meet your retirement goals because we care about your future.
Company HQ
Old Mountain View, Mountain View, CA
Leadership
Sam Liang
(Co-Founder & CEO)Earned a PhD from Stanford and then joined Cisco as a Senior Software Engineer. Worked as a Tech Lead at Google and is a member of the Forbes Technology Council.
Yun Fu
(Co-Founder & CTO)Has a PhD in Computer Science from Duke. Worked as Yahoo's Principal Software Engineer and was Head of Infrastructure at Particle Media.
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